LLM11733635
A Certain Good Queen Interceding with a Certain Prince for the Unhappy Belgravians and other Citizens. The selection of Hyde Park as the site for the building under whose roof was to be stored the exhibits of the great show of 1851 aroused opposition which, though parochial, was influential. As usual at that epoch when anything unpopular was being done in high places, it was fathered upon Prince Albert. He was not mentioned either in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords where the opposition was resolutely run. With fuller freedom Leech sketched the situation. We have the obdurate Prince wearing the semi military hat which some years earlier Punch had evolved out of his inner consciousness. There is a group representing all classes of the community, made one by the touch of nature that inspired them to action against what was regarded as the desecration of Hyde Park. Mr. Punch himself is shown in attitude of unwonted depression, whilst Lord John Russell, crushed under the weight of London's woe, has grown smaller than ever. Dropping into poetry, Punch laments the situation in heroic screed, that thus begins :- "There is a sound of sorrow through Wilton's Crescent fair; The Dowagers of Lowndes Street are tearing of their hair; The muffins stand in Eaton Square uneaten on the plate; The footmen group in gloomy knots round many an area gate. "And rents and hearts are going down in paltry Albert Row, A ghastly line of blank "To Lets" the first-floor windows show; The white cross on the old Park elms the sorry lodger sees, And straight prepares his trunk to go, like the unhappy trees. "The word is spoke 'tis past a joke Hyde Park the spot shall be, Where to the skies shall soon arise the House of Industry Pile high the bricks, the mortar mix, knock up the scaffold poles, Tread out the green, cut up the turf, with ruts and hills, and holes." These verses faithfully echo the feeling in Parliament. Lord Campbell and Lord Brougham vigorously attacked the project in the Lords, whilst in the Commons Colonel Sibthorpe denounced the Exhibition by whose presence the Park was to be desecrated as "the greatest trash, the greatest fraud, the greatest imposition ever attempted upon a free people." After all, the Exhibition was built in Hyde Park, and nobody was a penny the worse. July, 1850. Illustration for The Queen and Mr Punch, The Story of a Reign, Told by "Toby, M.P." (Bradbury, Agnew, 1898).By John Leech
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