COOK: "Well, to be sure, Mum! Last place I were in Missis always knocked at the door afore she come into the kitchen!!"]
[Illustration: COACHMAN: "Why--what's the matter, John Thomas?"
FOOTMAN: "Matter enuff! Here's the marchioness bin and giv me notice because I don't match Joseph, an' I must go, unless I can get my fat down in a week!"]
The relations of masters, mistresses and servants is a never ending theme in the pages of _Punch_. His attitude was governed by the broad principles that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that those who offered inadequate wages must expect neither character nor efficiency. But he draws a clear distinction between the domestic slave and the flunkey, holding that snobbery in employers was the chief cause of its prevalence amongst highly paid servants. _Punch_ was the champion of the "slavey"--immortalized in Dickens's "Marchioness"--even of the much-maligned charwoman; the relentless critic of Jeames, his plush and powder and calves. As early as 1847 we find him supporting a reversal of the old régime: the mistress must be approved by the servant, and furnish a satisfactory character. The plea is not surprising, when advertisements for a kitchen-maid, "wages £3 a year," appeared in a fashionable paper and earned _Punch's_ satire. Contrariwise, he never spares the arrogance of "servantgalism" the assumption of "my lady the housemaid." In this spirit _Punch_ makes game of a school for servants at Bristol, where lessons on the pianoforte were given, but if servant girls and nurses were neglectful of their duties and their infant charges, mistresses were equally to blame for their indolence and disregard of parental responsibilities. But the keenest arrows in _Punch's_ quiver were reserved for "Jeames." He quotes from the columns of _The Times_ the advertisements of a footman, "tall, handsome, with broad shoulders and extensive calves," who "prefers Belgravia or the North Side of the Park," while a little later on another of this type insists on "six months a year in town, and if in an unfashionable neighbourhood, five guineas extra salary." If I refrain from quoting from Thackeray's constant variations on this theme in the pages of _Punch_, it is only because they are so familiar to readers of his collected works. The etiquette of flunkeydom was peculiar. These gorgeous and pampered menials had their grievances; they were "expected to sit in church in a position from which the clergyman could neither be seen nor heard," as _Punch_ put it in 1851. Liveried servants were not allowed in Rawstorne Street Chapel, Brompton, in 1846, and a protest was made in the Press that at St. George's, Hanover Square, "the real aristocracy of the land are separated from their liveried domestics by a mere oak panelling." But in this war on flunkeyism "Jeames" was not the real enemy; it was rather the genius of snobbery which _Punch_ impersonated in "Jenkins" of the _Morning Post_ (or _Morning Plush_, as he called it), whose fulsome and lyrical rhapsodies are held up to ridicule in number after number. In this context two extracts may suffice, from an account of the galaxy of rank and fashion at the Opera which appeared in the _Morning Post_: