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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

THE COMIC
STRIP ART OF
JACK B. YEATS

Michael Connerty
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.”
It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within
Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor
field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to
becoming a nascentdiscipline , the journey has been a hard but spectacular
one. Those capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the
comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and
informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistica-
tion. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars
from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history,
aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital
realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of
60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to
50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include
new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provo-
cations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t
progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the
University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An
Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the
team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards
of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for interna-
tional media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC,
Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library.
The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels
and Comics Conference.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643
 Michael Connerty

The Comic Strip Art

of Jack B. Yeats
Michael Connerty
Animation and Visual Culture
Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Dublin, Ireland

ISSN 2634-6370     ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
ISBN 978-3-030-76892-8    ISBN 978-3-030-76893-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Fire Lighter (Detail), Puck, 14
March 1908

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Hago (Gerard Hagan) who shared his infectious enthusiasm for comics
many moons ago.
 Acknowledgement

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisors at Central

Saint Martins, UAL, Prof. Roger Sabin and Dr. Ian Horton. Their
guidance and good humour were crucial throughout—I could not have
asked for better support. I have had great experiences with the staff at the
Bodleian Library, Oxford; The British Library, London; Oldenburg
University Library; Trinity College Library, Dublin; The National Library,
Dublin; and particularly Pauline Swords and Kathryn Milligan at the Yeats
Archive at the National Gallery, Dublin. I would like to offer warm thanks
to those who have given valuable editorial advice on related texts pub-
lished elsewhere, especially John A. Lent, Benoit Crucifix, Maaheen
Ahmed, Paul Fagan, Tamara Radak, and John Greaney. I am grateful to
The Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust for the generous funding
of research travel. In no particular order I would like to add thanks for
advice, support, and encouraging conversation to Dr. Kevin Carpenter
and Dr. Marcus Free (both trail-blazers in this territory), Dr. Róisín
Kennedy, Dr. Oliver Schoenbeck, Dr. Ian Hague, Prof. Lawrence Grove,
Russ Bestley, Hedwig Schwall, and all at the Irish College in Leuven, Ben
Bethell, Pascal Lefevre, Paul Tumey, Charlie Minter, Guy Lawley, Dr. Tom
Walker, Lance Pettit, Joe Brooker, Susan Schreibman, Barry Anthony,
Christina Meyer, Robert Kirkpatrick, and to Andy Osborn for technical
assistance. Huge thanks to my parents, Vic and Bernie, and, finally, to
Maria, Scott, Rosalie, and Louie.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and

Illustration Work 15

3 A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 1890–1917 39

4 “Clever Jack B. Yeats”: His Work for Comics and Humour

Periodicals 79

5 Crime, Adventure, and Technology: Sources in Popular

Fiction and Media125

6 Street, Stage, and Circus: Worlds of Performance and

Spectacle187

7 Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip

Artist247

Bibliography263

Index277

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 A Broad Sheet No. 4 April 1902 26

Fig. 2.2 Jack B. Yeats, The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet pps. 6–7.
(Two images) 29
Fig. 2.3 Jack B. Yeats, A Little Fleet, p. 19 30
Fig. 2.4 Norma Borthwick, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge, or Irish Reading
Lessons II. (Illustration by Jack B. Yeats) p. 16 32
Fig. 3.1 Front Cover, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. (Main illustration by
W.F. Thomas), 14 September 1889 42
Fig. 3.2 Vandyke Browne, Mr. Comic Cuts, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1892 49
Fig. 3.3 Tom Browne, Lanky Larry and Bloated Bill (panel), Comic
Home Journal, 19 November 1898 51
Fig. 3.4 Percy Cocking, Racketty Row (panel), The Jester and Wonder,
25 September 1908 53
Fig. 3.5 Unknown artist, Advertisement for Ogden’s Cigarettes, The
Big Budget, 16 October 1897 57
Fig. 3.6 Julius Baker, Comic Cuts Colony, Comic Cuts, 9 July 1910 60
Fig. 3.7 Unknown artist, Illustration for London Life serial, The Jester
and Wonder, 16 August 1902 63
Fig. 3.8 Ralph Hodgson, Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy, The Big Budget,
16 April 1904 67
Fig. 3.9 Unknown artist, Comic Cuts, 20 June 1896 72
Fig. 4.1 Jack B. Yeats, “To Timahoe Says He,” 1885 82
Fig. 4.2 Jack B. Yeats, “History of a Proposal,” 1886 83
Fig. 4.3 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “Jemmy’s Cricket on the
Hearth,” The Vegetarian, 21 December 1889 85
Fig. 4.4 Jack B. Yeats, Tommy’s Opportune Moment, Ariel, 26
December 1891 89

xi
xii List of Figures

Fig. 4.5 Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Artist, Chums, 28 December 1892 90
Fig. 4.6 Jack B. Yeats, Families I have Done For, by Mary Jane No. 3:
The Skientific Family (panel), The Comic Home Journal, 8
June 1895 93
Fig. 4.7 Jack B. Yeats, Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders, The Funny Wonder, 2
January 1897 94
Fig. 4.8 Jack B. Yeats, Submarine Society, Lika Joko, 27 October 1894 97
Fig. 4.9 Jack B. Yeats, Squire Brummle’s Experiences, Lika Joko, 16
March 1895 98
Fig. 4.10 Jack B. Yeats, John Duff Pie Takes on Hare and Hound, The
Big Budget, 26 March 1898 100
Fig. 4.11 Jack B. Yeats, Comedy and Tragedy, The Jester and Wonder,
16 June 1906 102
Fig. 4.12 Jack B. Yeats, Roly-Poly, the World’s Champion Barrel-Trotter
in Japan, Comic Cuts, 15 January 1910 108
Fig. 4.13 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Adventures of Nelson
Hardbake—Baffled by Baffles,” The Jester and Wonder, 8
February 1908 110
Fig. 4.14 Jack B. Yeats, New Summer Games with a Strong war Flavour,
Punch, 2 August 1916 116
Fig. 4.15 Jack B. Yeats, Untitled, Punch, 1 December 1915 118
Fig. 5.1 Jack B. Yeats, Detective Chubblock Homes on the Track of
the Spring Poet, The Funny Wonder, 13 February 1897 129
Fig. 5.2 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Chublock Lays a Ghost, Comic Cuts, 5
January 1907; (b) Chublock and the Cigar Thief, Comic Cuts,
12 January 1908 (two images) 135
Fig. 5.3 Jack B. Yeats, “The Adventures of Kiroskewero, the Great
Detective, and Isle of Man, the Hunting Puss Cat,” The Big
Budget, 23 November 1901 137
Fig. 5.4 Jack B. Yeats, Jack Sheppard the Younger and Little Boy Pink
Fight a Duel at the Klondyke, The Big Budget, 26 March 1898 139
Fig. 5.5 Jack B. Yeats, “The Misadventures of Bill Bailey, Private
Detective (illustrated banner),” The Jester and Wonder, 3
December 1904 140
Fig. 5.6 Jack B. Yeats, The Cute Yank Gets Sucked in Once More,
The Funny Wonder, 2 April 1898 141
Fig. 5.7 Jack B. Yeats, Cockney Charles opens Oysters for a Wager,
The Jester and Wonder, 23 September 1905 143
Fig. 5.8 Jack B. Yeats, Convict One One One, the Ticket-of-Leave
Man, Does Skilly and the Rest a Good Turn, The Jester and
Wonder, 4 March 1905 145
 List of Figures  xiii

Fig. 5.9 Jack B. Yeats, Roly-Poly’s Tour Around the World, Comic
Cuts, 7 August 1909 152
Fig. 5.10 Jack B. Yeats, Sandab the Sailor Makes a Watch-Dog into a
Clock-­Dog, Puck, 12 February 1910 155
Fig. 5.11 Jack B. Yeats, Untitled (Sandab the Sailor), Puck, 27 July 1907 156
Fig. 5.12 Jack B. Yeats, The Little Stowaways Did Not Discover the
North Pole, Puck, 7 March 1908 159
Fig. 5.13 Jack B. Yeats, The Two Little Stowaways Give Eagle Beak a
Surprise, Puck, 7 December 1907 161
Fig. 5.14 Jack B. Yeats, “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and
Other Things,” The Funny Wonder, 30 April 1898 163
Fig. 5.15 Jack B. Yeats, The Log of the Pretty Polly (illustrated banner),
The Jester and Wonder, 11 March 1905 164
Fig. 5.16 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Skull and Crossbones
Club,” The Jester and Wonder, 22 July 1905 165
Fig. 5.17 Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Firelighter, Puck, 14 March 1908 169
Fig. 5.18 Unknown artist, The Burrowing Machine, The Jester and
Wonder 16 September 1908 170
Fig. 5.19 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Burrowing Machine, Puck,
2 May 1908 171
Fig. 5.20 Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Causes a Flutter of
Excitement, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1910 172
Fig. 5.21 (a) The Adventures of the Who-did-it, Comic Cuts, 21
September 1907; (b) The Adventures of the Who-did-it,
Comic Cuts, 28 September 1907 (two strips) 177
Fig. 6.1 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Carlo the Comical Conjuror and the
Vanishing Brick, The Jester, 15 June 1912; (b) Carlo the
Comical Conjuror has the Swell on the Carpet, The Jester, 6
July 1912 190
Fig. 6.2 Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler (Untitled), The Butterfly,
21 March 1914 194
Fig. 6.3 Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler Preserves his Nut, The
Butterfly, 20 February 1915 196
Fig. 6.4 Jack B. Yeats, At the Kinetoscope Show, The Funny Wonder,
20 November 1898 197
Fig. 6.5 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Bitter Cold by
I.C. Icle, The Jester and Wonder, 15 February 1908 199
Fig. 6.6 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Charlie’s Aunt—Still
Running, The Jester and Wonder, 25 January 1908 202
Figs. 6.7 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Gives a Star Turn, Comic
Cuts, 14 May 1910; (b) Dicky the Birdman Gets the Drop on
a Bad Boy, Comic Cuts, 4 June 1910 212
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 6.8 Jack B. Yeats, The Brothers Eggbert and Philbert Hold the
Glass up to Nature, The Butterfly, 22 January 1916 213
Fig. 6.9 Jack B. Yeats, Eggbert and Philbert (Untitled), The Butterfly,
2 September 1916 214
Fig. 6.10 Jack B. Yeats, Signor McCoy the Wonderful Hoss, The Big
Budget, 26 June 1897 216
Fig. 6.11 Jack B. Yeats, See Here—How to Run the Big Budget,
The Big Budget, 13 August 1898 217
Fig. 6.12 Jack B. Yeats, Chubblock Homes (panels), Comic Cuts,
7 April 1894 224
Fig. 6.13 Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Clever Gee-Gee as the Family
Ghost, The Jester and Wonder, 4 March 1905 226
Fig. 6.14 Signor McCoy Scored off the Old Boy, The Big Budget, 14
August 1897 229
Fig. 6.15 Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Detective Hoss Convicts a
Coiner, The Jester and Wonder, 10 March 1906 230
Fig. 6.16 Jack B. Yeats, Fairo the 2nd the Egyptian Camel. The Darling
is Driven Away, The Funny Wonder, 19 November 1898 231
Fig. 6.17 Jack B. Yeats, Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, The Jester
and Wonder, 12 March 1904 234
Fig. 6.18 Jack B. Yeats, Little Lord Fondlefoo Imitates Lickity Switch
the Educated Monk, and Thereby Hangs a Tale,
The Jester and Wonder, 9 April 1904 235
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A man rests his head in his hand, almost consumed by the thick impasto
strokes of paint that fill the interior of the train carriage in which he
reclines, apparently oblivious to the wild and abstract landscape that we
can see passing by the window behind him. There is a pervasive atmo-
sphere of melancholy and meditation, but also a vitality in the rich applica-
tion of colour. We will have cause to revisit trains and travel narratives over
the course of this text, but for now it’s sufficient to note that this painting,
Reverie (1931), once owned by the revolutionary activist and writer Ernie
O’Malley, and typical of the vividly expressive work produced by Jack
B. Yeats during the latter part of his career, sold at auction in November
2019 for €1.7 million, more than double the guide price.1 At the time of
writing it was just one of many recent indications that Yeats’ stature as one
of the major Irish artists of the twentieth century continues to grow, his
work familiar to a public well beyond the limits of the art world and spe-
cialist history. His landscapes and the enigmatic characters who populate
them have become part of the store of national iconography in the decades
following his death in 1957, appearing regularly in popular print media. In
Ireland, the fact that Jack Yeats produced comic strips at all generally
comes as a surprise to both art historians and admirers of his work, but the
fact that he was extremely prolific, was one of the most famous and suc-
cessful cartoonists of his generation, and produced some of the most

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_1
2 M. CONNERTY

popular characters of early British comics barely seems creditable.2 Faced

with the scale of Yeats’ output, published in comics that sold in the hun-
dreds of thousands every week, over a period of more than twenty-five
years, what is difficult to understand now is how these facts regarding his
career could have been overlooked for so long.
It can be argued that Yeats, during the earlier years of his career, was
primarily a professional comic strip artist, rather than a fine artist who
dabbled in commercial work for purely economic reasons, as is the con-
ventional view. What follows will, in part, amount to a refutation of that
specific contention about Yeats and present his work for the comics as
important and valuable in its own right. There are various social, political,
and cultural reasons for the valorisation of Yeats’ painting, his work in oils
particularly, over the mass marketed comic strips we will be looking at
here. Whether the critical emphasis is placed on the context of Irish nation-
alism or of European modernism, the comics present themselves as an
anomaly, and have not been significantly engaged with up to this point.
His career has almost exclusively been evaluated from an art-historical per-
spective, and his popular, ephemeral output has been relegated to the
periphery, despite the widespread scale of its circulation at the time of
initial publication. It is hoped that what follows can contribute to a
retrieval of this material from the relative obscurity to which it has been
consigned. To do this, it will be necessary to investigate the material from
various perspectives, and thus, while this is first and foremost a work of
Comics Studies, I will be taking the kind of interdisciplinary approach that
characterises much of the field, drawing on (and I hope contributing to)
Irish Studies, media history, and the study of Victorian and Edwardian
popular culture.
There were numerous examples of sequential graphic narrative pub-
lished throughout the nineteenth century and earlier, many of which for-
mally resemble the modern strip. Particularly during the second half of the
century the appearance of such sequences became increasingly common,
not only in the context of print comedy and cartooning, but also, for
example, in popular journalism. Thus, the comic strip was not itself a novel
graphic form in the 1880s, when Yeats began experimenting with it in his
pre-teens. For the purposes of this book, while acknowledging the exis-
tence of important antecedents and precedents, I will be taking the 1890s
as marking an important turning point in the development of the recogni-
sably modern comic strip, and of the ‘comic’ as a specific publishing cate-
gory. This was the decade that saw the arrival in the UK of a new class of
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

cheap publication, which aimed for mass circulation on an unprecedented

scale, targeting a far more generalised readership than the humour peri-
odicals of previous decades. The comics of this period prioritised a particu-
lar type of unsophisticated humorous illustration, increasingly in the form
of the strip as opposed to the single-panel cartoon, ultimately evolving
their own distinctive graphic style, and orienting themselves around recur-
ring characters and knockabout comedy. While aiming to fill gaps in the
critical engagement with publications of the 1890s, including Comic Cuts
(1890–1953) and The Big Budget (1897–1909), it is important to
acknowledge the earlier stages in the evolution of the comic strip, which
have been more extensively covered by scholars.
David Kunzle’s two-volume History of the Comic Strip establishes a
chronological development of the form, beginning in the fifteenth cen-
tury, situating each stage in the cultural and political context of the period.3
The focus of the second volume is mainly on nineteenth-century develop-
ments in France and Germany, but it also contains a chapter dedicated to
various manifestations of the comic strip in England and Scotland during
the second half of the nineteenth century, up to and including the comics
‘boom’ of the 1890s with which we are concerned here. Kunzle positions
the early comic strip within the evolving structures of modernity, empha-
sising how the fragmented, scattershot form of the comics page mirrored
the thrilling chaos of contemporary urban life.4 Although he does not
focus on the UK during the late nineteenth century, Thierry Smolderen’s
The Origins of Comics builds on Kunzle’s work, extending the focus to
include early American strips and concentrating on a number of key artists
associated with the large-circulation urban newspapers that provided a
platform for the evolving medium in the United States.5 He argues for
comics to be understood in terms of their medium-specific historical
development, but also in relation to other facets of late nineteenth-­century
visual culture. His elucidation of the evolving graphic vocabulary and its
historical basis in, to take one British example, William Hogarth’s inter-
weaving of high and low cultural registers, is useful for the consideration
of the narrative and stylistic options open to Yeats and other comics artists
of the later period, as well as allowing for an assessment of the relationship
of caricature, cartooning, and comic strips to art history more generally.
Earlier, in the first edited collection to comprehensively map out this
scholarly territory, Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick drew together work
by various scholars, including Kunzle, focusing on European contexts, as
4 M. CONNERTY

well as the UK and US, in their Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip
in the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1998.6
Richard Scully has made substantial contributions to the scholarship on
nineteenth-century cartooning in the UK, particularly as detailed in his
Eminent Victorian Cartoonists,7 which argues for the importance of work
by a number of previously underexamined and, in some cases, disregarded
artists, many of whom would certainly have been familiar to the young
Yeats. Although the focus is primarily on single-panel cartoons, and par-
ticularly political and editorial cartoons, the volumes contain valuable
material dealing with social, cultural, and technological developments
during the period immediately before Yeats’ entry into the profession.
Punch was certainly the most successful and widely imitated of the
nineteenth-­century British periodicals, and it had a far-reaching impact on
comic art regionally within the UK, throughout the British Empire, and
in the United States. Historical and critical materials on humour periodi-
cals such as Punch are relevant to the present study for at least two reasons.
Firstly, Yeats contributed to Punch and similar titles both before and after
he began his work as a comic strip artist, and thus consideration of this
area is essential to a complete assessment of his career as a cartoonist.
Secondly, because the comics chiefly evolved out of the graphic humour
tradition in the UK, it is useful to have a sense of how those publications
differed from the comics, but also of what they shared with them, in terms
of style, content, and industrial context. Brian Maidment has also contrib-
uted valuable scholarship to the mapping out of nineteenth-century car-
tooning, and to the retrieval of work by hitherto overlooked artists.8
Patrick Leary’s The Punch Brotherhood outlines the social and cultural
structures that underpinned the production of Punch and provides a sense
of the social world of cartooning and illustration into which Yeats emerged
in the final decade of the century.9 Writing in the 1950s, R.G.G. Price
devotes a small amount of space to Yeats’ contributions, as well as provid-
ing a comprehensive overview of some of the technological developments
in printing and production that ushered in significant changes in graphic
style during the 1880s and 1890s.10 Scully characterises Punch as a kind of
‘informal empire’ that disseminated imperialist ideology throughout the
British dominions.11 Its influence was also felt in Ireland, where Punch was
widely read, and there are a small number of texts that deal with cartoon-
ing and the humour periodicals in that context, the most useful being
James Curry and Ciarán Wallace’s extensively illustrated volume on car-
toonist Thomas Fitzpatrick.12 It is important to note at this point that
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

there was no indigenous comics production in Ireland during these years,

though many of the titles to which Yeats contributed were widely distrib-
uted there.
One of the earliest chroniclers of the new British comics of the 1890s was
Denis Gifford. Gifford was a practioner rather than a scholar, and as a col-
lector, cataloguer, and populariser of early British comics, produced sev-
eral books, including Victorian Comics and The British Comic Catalogue,
that are, in the absence of more academic texts, essential sources for any
researcher.13 However, there are numerous gaps in both of these texts in
relation to Yeats, with various series not listed at all, and many of those that
do feature simply listed by title and year of first appearance, with no indica-
tion of precise publication dates or length of run. In general, not a great
deal of scholarly attention has been focused on the evolution of the British
comic strip in the 1890s, and the subsequent decades of its growing popu-
larity, and certainly there is no single source covering this period specifi-
cally, although valuable material is contained in texts with a wider focus, as
well as a number that examine particular artists or titles. Examples of the
former include a number of books by Roger Sabin, in which discussion of
wider international histories of comics includes useful material on the
development of British comics during this decade.14 As an example of the
latter, Sabin has written widely on the popular cartoon character Ally
Sloper, a forerunner, in the 1880s, of the strips discussed here, and, with
Simon Grennan and Julian Waite, has specifically revealed the contribution
to the evolution of the form made by Marie Duval (the pseudonym of
Isabella Tessier) during this period.15 Their co-authored monograph, Marie
Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist, demonstrates how an interdisciplin-
ary approach to comics history can open up the complex and intercon-
nected worlds of media, entertainment, and industrial practice within
which cartoonists were operating during the latter decades of the nine-
teenth century. As the first ‘star’ character in British comic art, Sloper
achieved a degree of recognition and celebrity that later artists, aiming to
build relationships between weekly publications and their readerships,
would seek to emulate. Sabin’s analysis of critical responses to the comics
in the late Victoria and Edwardian periods provides a useful overview of
contemporary reception, and the relationship of the comics to other areas
of popular publishing.16 Paul Gravett and Kevin Carpenter have also both
published research that covers the period under discussion.17 Carpenter was
responsible for building a very substantial collection of British comics at the
University of Oldenburg, and Wonderfully Vulgar, the online iteration of
6 M. CONNERTY

an exhibition based on this material, remains an important showcase of the

era’s comic strip artists, including Yeats.18 Texts dealing specifically with
individual comic strip artists working at the same time as Yeats are rare, and
one that does do this, John Harding’s biography of Ralph Hodgson,
focuses far more thoroughly on Hodgson’s subsequent career as a poet
than on his work as a cartoonist and art editor for the comics.19 Given the
importance of his role, as the media tycoon and visionary entrepreneur
behind the comics boom of the 1890s, and as publisher of many of the
titles to which Yeats contributed, studies dealing with Alfred Harmsworth,
such as Paul Ferris’ biography, provide important context for an analysis of
the industry and the commercial imperatives that necessarily shaped the
strips.20 The evolution of the comic strip in the US has been more exten-
sively covered by scholars, and some of the conceptual and historical frame-
works that underpin their writing can be usefully applied to the UK, as
with, for example, Ian Gordon’s book, Comic Strips and Consumer
Culture,21 in which he considers comics as part of a revolution in reader
demographics, advertising, leisure activity, mass entertainment, and con-
sumerism. Christina Meyer’s monograph, Producing Mass Entertainment:
The Serial Life of The Yellow Kid, offers useful ways to think about the roles
played by seriality and transmedia narrative in the functioning of comic
strips during this period.22
Though not explicitly focused on comics, authors such as Reed, Conboy,
and Kirkpatrick provide vital contextual information on the magazine and
periodical publishing industry in the UK, covering a number of related
genres such as the penny dreadful and the boys’ adventure magazine.23 It is
important to note that there were other types of publication which did not
specialise in the humorous graphic arts, but which were nonetheless impor-
tant in generating both a popular readership, and in pioneering specific
areas of form, layout, and content, that would later be adapted by the pub-
lishers of comic papers. In his overview of the popular magazine’s evolu-
tion in Britain, David Reed suggests that its nineteenth-­century history can
be divided into two periods, pre- and post-1880, and he regards the publi-
cation of George Newnes’ Tit-bits (1881–1989) in 1881 as pivotal.24 The
enormous success of this title inspired numerous imitations over the course
of the 1880s, two of which would contribute in various ways to the style
and content of the comics, James Henderson’s Scraps (1883–1910) and
Alfred Harmsworth’s Answers to Correspondents (1888–1889; 1889–1955
as ‘Answers’). As we will see, the first comics contained much material that
was not in cartoon or comic strip form, featuring the same kinds of literary
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

serials, feature articles, and general interest material as did many of the
other magazines and periodicals of the time. While all of these scholarly
perspectives contribute to the establishment of an industrial and cultural
context against which we can interrogate and position the work of Jack
B. Yeats in particular, it is also intended that this book should build on
previous research into British comics more generally, and function as a sub-
stantial contribution to that history. The comics capitalised on an audience
that already existed for various forms of popular spectacle and entertain-
ment and drew on these forms in their mode of address, their visual style,
and the thematic content of their strips. Thus authors of cultural histories,
such as Peter Bailey and Andrew Horrall, give us a sense of the audiences
for whom Yeats was catering, and the evolving world of mass entertainment
to which he was contributing.25 The growing literature on popular cultural
areas of specific interest to Yeats, music hall and the circus for example, has
informed more narrowly themed subsections.26
Although there has been little attention paid to his illustration work, and
almost none to his cartoons, it would not be true to say that there is a com-
plete absence of critical writing on these aspects of Yeats’ career. In the two
most important biographies of Jack Yeats by Pyle and Arnold, and particu-
larly in the case of the latter, quite a bit of space is given to discussion of the
cartoon and illustration work that Yeats produced during the late 1880s
and early 1890s for humour periodicals such as Ariel, Paddock Life and
Judy.27 Arnold devotes several paragraphs to analysis of these cartoons, as
does Pyle, although the comic strips don’t receive the same degree of atten-
tion as this material when their respective accounts reach that point in the
narrative of Yeats’ artistic development.28 Pyle, in an earlier text, sum-
marises Yeats’ comic strip output briefly, saying that at this time he “was
contributing to less elevated publications too, Chums (1892–1941), where
he appeared after 1892, Illustrated Chips (1890–1953), and Comic Cuts
(1890–1953) and other Harmsworth journals.”29 That critical and bio-
graphical accounts should have stopped short of the comics in this way is
partly explicable in terms of the lack of literature available at that time
detailing this early period in British comics history, much less Yeats’ role in
it. Moreover, the strips themselves were, for the most part, hidden away
within bound volumes in a small number of library archives, and had never
been reprinted, having long since disappeared from view in the time-­
honoured manner of popular ephemera. Hilary Pyle’s later publication, The
Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats, does devote a little more space to the
comics, although its chief value resides in its positioning of Yeats beyond
8 M. CONNERTY

the established boundaries of the fine art world, cataloguing and analysing
his extensive activities as a black and white artist, illustrator, and cartoon-
ist.30 It is hoped that the present volume might add in some small way to
the rigorous scholarship contained in that indispensable book. Throughout
her writing on Yeats, Pyle has been consistently alive to the various compet-
ing, and perhaps contradictory, elements in his life and career, noting that
the “practice of combining the serious with the frivolous became a pattern
of his creativity.”31 Writing more recently, art historians such as Róisín
Kennedy and Angela Griffith have built on this work in fresh and revealing
ways, revising and expanding our sense of Yeats’ relationship to popular
forms of art, media, and entertainment.32 Given that the discussion that
follows takes place at the intersection of two broad scholarly fields—Comics
Studies and Irish Studies—efforts will be made to clarify certain elements
for readers who are primarily familiar with one or other of these areas, or
indeed with neither.
Much of the relevant material is held in the British Library Newspaper
Collection and in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The condition of many
of the comics, the majority bound in volumes capturing a full year each, is
poor. Those published by Alfred Harmsworth in particular were printed
on the cheapest available paper, which is now so brittle as to make even
careful examination difficult. Indeed, several of the British Library’s vol-
umes are now marked ‘unfit for use.’ Long perusal of these volumes
involves extremely cautious turning of the delicate pages, and even with
the greatest of care it is difficult to avoid the crumbling of tiny shards of
browned paper onto the desktop. This physical deterioration prompts an
urgency with regard to the assessment of the material currently held in
libraries and archives. The collection purchased by Kevin Carpenter for the
library at Oldenburg University in Germany is less substantial, though is
in superior condition, the more compact bound volumes originally form-
ing part of Amalgamated Press’s own archive. In the Bodleian Library a
small part of the collection exists in the form of boxed individual comics,
affording the researcher the opportunity to access the material precisely as
would have been the case for contemporary readers.33
In the following chapter (Chap. 2) I will present a necessarily selective
overview of Yeats’ career and the evolution of his artistic reputation. Rather
than engaging with the painting work for which he is best known, the aim
here is to examine how a particular conception of Yeats has been built up
and structured around it, to the exclusion of the comic strips and other
related material. There are some parallels to be drawn between the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

cartooning and the work in oils for which he is best known, for example in
the playful, and sometimes enigmatic, relation of text and image evident in
the titling of many of his paintings, and in recurring thematic and compo-
sitional elements. Over the course of his career, and particularly during the
decades that he was drawing the comic strips, Yeats produced work in a
number of areas that relate more directly to his cartooning, and there will
be an emphasis placed on these activities here. He wrote and produced
illustrations for miniature theatre plays, as well as illustrating stories for
children, written by himself and others. We can recognise continuities in
style and content between the comic strips and these publications, which
also evidence Yeats’ love of the print culture of the past, and a nostalgic
instinct that is key to an understanding of his popular art. Chapter 3 will
establish the context in which Yeats’ contribution can be better under-
stood—that of the early development of the comic strip in the United
Kingdom during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Yeats’ career
can be effectively mapped onto the broader narrative of this development,
given that he began by contributing illustrations and cartoons to various
humour publications before embracing the boom in mass-market comics,
exemplified by Alfred Harmsworth’s Comic Cuts. The conventions regard-
ing presentation, layout, humour, and graphic style were quickly estab-
lished and these impacted on the creative options available to Yeats over the
course of his career as a cartoonist. Chapter 4 will examine how Yeats met
the demands of the evolving medium. He appears to have instinctively
understood the need for the comic papers to draw on the surrounding
world of popular media and entertainment culture and condense the asso-
ciated thrills and spectacle into the vital, concise form of the comic strip.
Yeats developed an instantly recognisable and idiosyncratic approach to the
production of appealing material for his readers, while continuing to orient
his strips around some of his favourite themes: the outsider, street culture,
and performance. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the
commercial imperatives imposed by the context of the industrialised mass
media structures within which he operated.
Yeats was a very prolific artist who produced hundreds of strips and car-
toons over the course of his career. The majority of these strips feature
recurring characters, who appeared in series that ran for months, in some
cases years, at a time. In order to fully apprehend the variety of this mate-
rial, it will be helpful to examine it in a series of themed subsections over
the course of Chaps. 5 and 6. Although it is not possible to be exhaustive
in the current context, and many strips and characters cannot be included,
10 M. CONNERTY

the majority will be interrogated in relation to popular literature, specifi-

cally crime and adventure literature, and contemporary forms of spectacle
and entertainment, such as music hall and the circus. Many of Yeats’ strips
provide early examples of parody and intertextuality in the comics, and
cultural context is key to understanding their various effects. Two more
central themes in Yeats’ work will be given special attention in these chap-
ters. Firstly, the representation of animal characters, and his particular take
on anthropomorphism. Secondly, and perhaps most surprisingly to anyone
familiar with his work, his engagement with modernity and technology,
often through the employment of tropes associated with the nascent sci-
ence fiction genre. The work was once well known, and several of Yeats’
characters proved popular with the public. A key issue which the final chap-
ter (Chap. 7) will address is the absence of this substantial body of work
from biographical or art-historical accounts of Yeats’ career. One factor is
certainly the condescension with which comics have traditionally been
regarded by the art-world establishment, and this, arguably, impacted
Yeats’ own sense of himself as a strip artist as much as it has subsequently
coloured the wider critical neglect of this aspect of his career. Socio-political
factors, such as the Irish nationalist ambivalence (before and after indepen-
dence) towards British popular culture, and the identification of Yeats with
an insular construction of national identity, left little space for the comic
strip work in the narrative of his development as an artist.
Jack Yeats was one of a small group who helped shape the form of
popular comics in Britain, in a manner that would remain constant through
much of the twentieth century. There was a vast audience for this work,
which would have included large numbers of children, as well as many,
many others who would not have been exposed to his work as a painter,
but who, rather, encountered Yeats as a popular entertainer, a graphic
purveyor of accessible gags and slapstick comedy. In the past, there have
been issues in dealing with Yeats concerning the privileging of certain
sources, and I hope that the identification and assessment of this wealth of
material will open up fresh perspectives on Jack Yeats the artist and offer
profitable avenues of research for scholars of cultural history, British com-
ics, and Irish art. Additional strips and cartoons continue to pop up, and
I’ve no doubt that this will continue to be the case into the future. It is
further hoped that something of the humour and vitality of these strips
and the characters therein can be not only acknowledged but enjoyed and
celebrated, and that we can tip our collective hat in recognition of Yeats’
great achievement.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Notes
1. Sarah Slater, “Jack Butler Yeats painting makes €1.7m in ‘white glove
sale’” Irish Independent, 28 November 2019.
2. Throughout the book I will be referring to ‘British’ comics (as opposed to,
say, ‘English’ comics). One reason for this is to indicate the geographical
boundaries within which the publications were distributed and consumed.
Another is to present the earlier comics as belonging to the graphic tradi-
tion that would later include examples such as The Beano and The Dandy
(both published in Scotland). It should be noted that prior to the forma-
tion of the Irish Free State in 1922, ‘British’ could be understood to mean
‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.’
3. David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip Vol. 1: Picture Stories and
Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet, ca. 1450–1826 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973); and The History of the Comic Strip
Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).
4. At the time of writing, a new work by Kunzle has been announced (David
Kunzle, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, A Kaleidoscope 1847–70,
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2021). I regret that the present
work will therefore not be informed by what will be, one suspects, an
insightful and thorough rethinking of that period.
5. Thierry Smolderen, The Origin of the Comics: From William Hogarth to
Winsor McCay, translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson:
University of Mississippi, 2014).
6. Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre eds. Forging a New Medium: The Comic
Strip in the Nineteenth Century (Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998).
7. Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists Vols 1–3, (London: The
Political Cartoon Society, 2018).
8. Brian Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
9. Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in
Mid-­Victorian London, London: British Library, 2010.
10. R.G.G. Price, A History of Punch. London: Collins, 1957.
11. Richard Scully, “A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a
Model Publication, 1841–1936”, International Journal of Comic Art 15
No. 2 (2013):8; see also Brian Maidment, “The Presence of Punch in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler eds. Asian
Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).
12. James Curry and Ciarán Wallace, Thomas Fitzpatrick and the Leprechaun
Cartoon Monthly (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2015).
12 M. CONNERTY

13. Denis Gifford, Victorian Comics (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1976); Denis Gifford, The British Comic Catalogue (Westport Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1975).
14. Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon.
1996); and Adult Comics: an Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993).
15. Roger Sabin, “Ally Sloper: the First Comics Superstar?” in A Comics
Studies Reader, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press), 177–189; Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian
Waite, Marie Duval, Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2020); and Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin,
and Julian Waite, Marie Duval (Oxford: Myriad Editions, 2018).
16. Roger Sabin, “Comics versus books: the new criticism at the ‘fin de siè-
cle’.” In Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism and
Nineteenth Century Word and Image edited by Simon Grennan and
Lawrence Grove, 107–129. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015.
17. Paul Gravett, “The Cartoonist’s Progress: The Inventors of Comics in
Great Britain.” In Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the
Nineteenth Century, edited by Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre,
(Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998) 79–103; and Kevin Carpenter,
Penny Dreadfuls and Comics: English Periodicals for Children from Victorian
Times to the Present Day (London: V&A Publishing, 1983). See also: James
Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011;
and Michael Demson and Heather Brown, “Ain’t I de Maine Guy in Dis
Parade?”: towards a radical history of comic strips and their audience since
Peterloo” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2 No. 2 (2011): 151–167.
18. “Wonderfully Vulgar: British Comics 1873–1939” accessed at wonderful-
lyvulgar.de on 23 July 2020.
19. John Harding, Dreaming of Babylon: The Life and Times of Ralph Hodgson
(London: Greenwich Exchange, 2008).
20. Paul Ferris, The House of Northcliffe: The Harmsworths of Fleet Street
(London: Garden City Press, 1971). See also: Howard Cox and Simon
Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
21. Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (Washington DC:
Smithsonian Institute, 1998).
22. Christina Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the
Yellow Kid (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019).
23. David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States
1880–1960 (London: The British Library, 1997); Martin Conboy, The
Press and Popular Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 2001); and
Robert J. Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller:
A Bibliographic History of the Boys’ periodical in Britain 1762–1930
(London: The British Library, 2013).
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

24. David Reed, op. cit. 99.

25. Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Andrew Horrall, Popular
Culture in London c. 1890–1918: The Transformation of Entertainment.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
26. For example, on the circus: Gillian Arrighi, The circus and modernity: a
commitment to the ‘newer’ and the ‘newest’ Early Popular Visual Culture
10 no. 2 (2012): 169–185; Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in
Aerial Performance (London: Routledge, 2005); on music hall: Dagmar
Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict. Translated by
Roy Kift (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Barry J. Faulk, Music
hall and modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).
27. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1970); Bruce
Arnold, Jack Yeats (New haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1998).
28. For example, see Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 58–59; Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 36–37.
29. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 40.
30. Hilary Pyle, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 1994).
31. Pyle, 1993, op. cit. 94.
32. Róisín Kennedy, “Divorcing Jack … from Irish Politics”; Angela Griffith,
“Impressions: Jack Yeats’ Approach to Fine Art Publishing,” both in
Yvonne Scott ed. Jack B. Yeats: Old and New Departures (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2008).
33. I am also grateful to Dr Marcus Free for sharing with me his collection of
comics from this period, many of which are, again, in their original form as
individual issues.
 CHAPTER 2

A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting,

Drawing, and Illustration Work

Jack Butler Yeats was born on 29 August 1871 at 23 Fitzroy Road in

London, the city of his birth a not insignificant detail in the light of his
later canonisation as a national icon in Ireland. He is among the most
important Irish visual artists of the twentieth century—many would say
the most important—and has long been celebrated as such within Ireland
itself where he remains a very well-known figure. His fame internationally
has always been less substantial, particularly relative to that of his older
brother, William B. Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright.
His two sisters, Lily and Elizabeth, were co-founders of the Dun Emer
Guild, which helped establish the Irish Arts and Crafts movement in the
early 1900s. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter of limited success,
who is recorded in most of the biographical accounts as having misman-
aged his career as an artist and lawyer, and jeopardised the family’s finan-
cial stability through an impractical approach to his business affairs.1 The
family, of Anglo-Irish Protestant stock, were “‘respectable’ gentlefolk who
had come down in the world.”2 Jack’s mother, Susan Pollexfen, was reput-
edly uncomfortable around her husband’s artistic friends, and was very
attached to the Sligo of her childhood, to which she would frequently
travel, often for long spells, with the children.3 Jack himself was to spend
a good deal of his childhood in Sligo living with his maternal grandpar-
ents, a period and a location that would resurface frequently in his art and
writing throughout the rest of his life. His grandfather, William Pollexfen,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_2
16 M. CONNERTY

had apparently experienced a life of high adventure prior to settling into a

career as a successful merchant, having run away to sea at the age of
twelve.4 Jack enjoyed the comic papers as a child,5 and there is substantial
evidence that he was a keen draughtsman and sketcher from an early age.6
Much of the juvenilia that survives is in the form of cartoons and comic
strips, indicating that it was specifically this area of graphic endeavour that
preoccupied him at this time in his life.
He returned to London in 1887, having received all his schooling dur-
ing the intervening years in Sligo, and attended the South Kensington Art
School, later taking classes at the Chiswick School of Art.7 T.G. Rosenthal
suggests that in many respects a more significant event of this period was
his acquiring a season ticket for the American exhibition at Earls Court,
where the main attraction was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.8 This was
certainly a time during which Yeats immersed himself in the sporting and
entertainment world of the city, something that would have a profound
influence on the character of his later cartooning and comic strip work. He
received sporadic training as a painter in London, between 1887 and
1889, but never completed his artistic education. Bruce Arnold suggests
that there were a number of disadvantages to his being largely self-taught.
He did not learn his craft from a more experienced painter, nor did he
move in the artistic circles that might have given him access to current
ideas about art and artistic practice.9 He would suffer later from various
technical shortcomings, for example in the preparation of paint and can-
vas, and this has had an impact on the condition of his work in oil over
time. It is possible that this lack of formal training as a painter, which
delayed his entry into that area by some years, was instrumental in his
development as a black and white graphic artist, and ultimately as a car-
toonist and illustrator. The skills of draughtsmanship which he undoubt-
edly possessed had themselves been honed, without tuition, during the
hours of obsessive sketching and doodling with which he had occupied
himself from an early age. Arnold draws attention to the fact that Jack’s
father’s inability to generate a regular income for himself and his family
was partly due to “an unrealistic fastidiousness about taking work as an
illustrator,”10 and it is tempting to interpret this as fuelling the work ethic
and dogged pursuit of precisely that kind of opportunity which character-
ised Jack’s early professional activities. It may have given the young Yeats
a very pragmatic motivation for ignoring the perceived cultural hierarchies
that existed around the various forms of artistic practice.
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 17

In any event, having received an introduction to the editor through a

friend, Roland Hall, while still a student at the Chiswick School of Art,11
Jack Yeats began his career as an illustrator contributing drawings to a
periodical titled The Vegetarian (1888–1920), in 1888, maintaining the
relationship up to 1894. Over subsequent years he would have his work
published in a number of other publications that dealt more specifically in
humorous content. These titles were broadly in the mould of the humour
periodicals that had thrived during the second half of the century, and
included Paddock Life (1888–1900), Chums, and Judy (1867–1910).
Most of the material produced by Yeats during this early period came in
the form of single-panel cartoons, which generally appeared with a line of
text below the image that clarified the thrust of the joke, as was the norm.
He continued to produce this kind of material for some years following his
shift to the strip format preferred by the new comic papers. A crucial ele-
ment of many of the essentialist definitions of comics is the requirement
that they consist of a sequence of images, hence ‘sequential graphic narra-
tive’ has become a widely accepted phrase within Comics Studies, and
editorial newspaper cartoons and single-panel gags, for example, have
tended to fall outside the purview of the field. It is unlikely that Yeats
himself, or his contemporaries, would have differentiated in the same way
between these different modes, and while our main focus here is on the
sequential strips, it is important to also consider correspondences between
these and other examples of his cartooning and illustration work. It will be
particularly instructive to consider such examples where these appear in
the publications that also featured his strips. His first contribution to the
comics came in December of 1892 with the two-panel strip titled “All
Gone to Pot,” published in Comic Cuts, the historically important title
first published by Alfred Harmsworth two years earlier.12 It’s not clear by
what means he initiated what would become a lengthy relationship with
Comic Cuts, whether through a social or professional contact, or simply by
answering one of the advertisements seeking graphic work that regularly
appeared in its pages. “Clever artists should submit work to the editor of
‘Comic Cuts’ enclosing large stamped directed envelope for return, in case
of rejection,” was an almost weekly call, accompanied by a pledge that
payment would be “immediate.”13 He was to continue providing strips for
Comic Cuts and for various other titles published by Alfred Harmsworth—
as well as for comics published by others—over the quarter century that
followed, and while he also produced work in other areas, including
18 M. CONNERTY

illustration and fine art, this was to be his principal professional activity
throughout that period.
In 1894, at which point he had been contributing for two years to the
comics, in addition to the sporting magazines and humour periodicals
with which he was already associated, Yeats married fellow artist Mary
Cottenham White (‘Cottie’) and began to live a settled life in a cottage in
Strete, Devon. During this time, he was also pushing to bring his drawing
and watercolour work to public attention. In 1897 he held an exhibition
of watercolours at the Clifford Gallery in London, almost all of which
were executed in Devon. Pyle notes in this work “the same angularity, the
emphasis on graphic treatment” that was evident in his black and white
work of the period.14 Yeats kept sketchbooks throughout his life, many of
which are now held in the National Gallery of Ireland’s Jack Yeats Archive,
and these provide a vivid visual diary that offers fascinating insight into his
daily life, his travels, and his artistic preoccupations. These are mainly
pocket-sized books, manufactured by Daler, which in total comprise in the
region of nine thousand pages of sketches and notes.15 There were regular
trips back to Ireland, and in numerous sketchbooks he documents land-
scapes and small-town life, including local characters and incidents. We
can also get a sense of his life in Devon, and his trips to London and
beyond. There are numerous drawings of stage shows and sporting events,
particularly boxing and horse racing. There are many, many drawings of
people: friends and acquaintances; strangers observed in public places,
often engaged in specific professional activities; performers, including
singers, stage actors, and comedians; all kinds of characters captured in
speedily executed ink and pencil sketches. The books are also filled with
small details, including shop signs, advertising hoardings, whiskey bottle
labels, and the covers of cheap paperbacks in window displays, evidencing
the wandering eye of a flaneur in his enthusiastic absorption in contempo-
rary urban life. Much of this spirit is also evident in his strips, and the
sketchbooks constitute a common pool of source material for Yeats, a link
between the comics work, the illustration, and the paintings.
In 1899 Yeats held another exhibition of his work, titled “Sketches of
Life in the West of Ireland,” at the Walker Art Gallery in London, repeated
later in the year at Leinster Hall in Dublin. Throughout the period that he
worked as a comic strip artist, Yeats alternated between galleries in these
two cities with reasonable regularity, averaging one solo show annually up
to 1914. At this point, there were various important figures in Yeats’ life
who played roles in his burgeoning fine art career, such as the New York
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 19

lawyer John Quinn, who bought many of his paintings, and was instru-
mental in getting him into the Armory Show, the celebrated event in the
early evolution of American modernism, also referred to as the International
Exhibition of Modern Art, in 1913. It’s unlikely that Yeats would have
known that several of the other exhibited painters at this pivotal event,
including Rudolph Dirks and Gus Mager, were also active comic strip art-
ists, contributing to some of the most popular American newspapers of the
time.16 Yeats didn’t attend himself, and travelled to New York only once,
in 1904, to attend a large exhibition of his work, organised by Quinn, at
Clausen’s Gallery, on Fifth Avenue.17 Another impactful figure for Yeats
was Lady Gregory, a patron of the arts and one of the key drivers of the
Cultural Revival that invigorated the literary and dramatic—and to a lesser
extent the visual—arts in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth and into the
early twentieth century.18 Following a visit to her home in May 1899, dur-
ing which she may well have encouraged Yeats’ fine art ambitions, his
father wrote to her that “I think you have done a great deal with Jack […]
he has ideas, ambitions, hopes that he never had before.”19 In any event,
she was very public in her admiration for him, promoting him as an impor-
tant national artist, and became a regular attendee at his Irish exhibitions.20
He returned to Ireland to settle permanently in 1910, and while he would
maintain his ties to the London-based comics industry, and continue to be
a very active comic strip artist for some years to come, this was nonetheless
a decade of transition for him, and by the end of it the painting had
become dominant, and would remain so for the rest of his career.
Yeats did not come to oil painting until later in his life—he was thirty-­
one at the time that his earliest known painting in oil was produced in
1902—and the majority of the work for which he is best known was exe-
cuted after he had ceased to work as a comic strip artist (although he
continued to produce single-panel cartoons for Punch until well into his
sixties). In 1920 he was involved in the establishment, with Paul Henry,
Mary Swanzy, and others, of the Irish Painters Society, an organisation of
young artists eager to absorb the currents of contemporary European
modernism and open up new possibilities for support and exhibition.
Other important figures, central to the development of the visual arts in
Ireland in the twentieth century, such as Manie Jellett and Harry Clarke,
would join this group over the next few years.21 The work executed during
this earlier phase of his career as a painter was largely illustrative in style,
and in that sense can be readily linked to his black and white work, and
indeed to his comic strips. He often focuses on characters, representative
20 M. CONNERTY

of broad ‘types,’ and using a visual shorthand familiar from popular car-
tooning, as in The Bruiser (1900) and The Lesser Official (1913). The
bustling interiors in paintings like A Full Tram (1923) and Jazz Babies
(1929) suggest a preoccupation with urban modernity that would be less
evident in the work of his later years, but which echoes that milieu as it
appeared in many of his series for the comics. Drawing on the illustrative
and cartoon material he contributed to periodicals in the late 1880s and
1890s, there are numerous images depicting the predominantly masculine
world of sports, including depictions of pugilistic encounters, such as The
Small Ring (1930), which also pays close attention to the surrounding
crowd. This focus on audience is a notable feature of a number of his
paintings depicting scenes of performance and spectacle, for example in
theatrical scenes like National Airs: Patriotic Airs (1923) and Willy Reilly
at the Old Mechanics Theatre (c. 1899–1909), the latter foreshadowing, in
composition as well as theme, his stage-bound comic strip from 1907 to
1908, ‘The Jester Theatre Royal.’
Perhaps more conventionally associated with Yeats in the public mind
are his representations of the west of Ireland, for example in a work like
Island Men Returning (1919), which vividly renders the nobility of hard-
ened fishermen pitting their strength against the dramatic swell of the
Atlantic. There are several well-known paintings that do perhaps suggest a
straightforwardly Republican agenda, such as Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’:
Croke Park (1923), which commemorates the events of ‘Bloody Sunday,’
when British forces opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match in
Dublin in 1920. If many of the accounts of Yeats have dwelt on the per-
ceived nationalism of his art, and rooted it firmly in an Irish sensibility, it
is also true that others have recognised influences from outside Ireland,
including the impact of specific painters such as London-based Walter
Sickert, and representatives of contemporary movements in European art,
including Edvard Munch, Edward Degas, and Yeats’ friend, Oskar
Kokoschka.22 Having produced many important paintings during the
1920s, there was a period during the middle of the 1930s when Yeats was
not especially productive. Arnold notes that he had a solo exhibition in
Dublin in 1931 but did not exhibit on his own again until 1939.23 An
important retrospective exhibition of his work was held in the National
College of Art in Dublin, opening in June 1945.
This event represented the most significant consolidation of his work
up to that point and was the occasion of his “being honoured by his coun-
try, as its greatest living painter.”24 Brian P. Kennedy’s remarks on the
 2 A LIFE OF JACK B. YEATS: HIS PAINTING, DRAWING, AND ILLUSTRATION… 21

development of his technique in the later years suggest the degree to

which Yeats had shifted artistically since his time as a cartoonist. He tended
not to use underdrawing in the execution of his late work, seeming to
ultimately lose interest in line, which he abandoned in favour of “a form
of free oil painting.”25 Many of these images include dramatically rendered
horses, sometimes pictured alone, sometimes in relation to human figures,
who, though far removed stylistically, nonetheless recall the equine car-
toon characters of his youth. There is still plenty of evidence of his earlier
interests—for example, the circus and fairground remained an abidingly
rich source of material, as evidenced by later paintings like The Water
Chute (1944) and They Love Me (1950). The love of disguise and dressing
up is still a feature of paintings like The Bang the Door Boys (1944) and The
Fool Chase (1944), both of which echo similarly uncanny subjects in the
paintings of James Ensor, whose rough incorporation of cartooning and
caricatural tradition into his work of the 1880s also bears comparison with
Yeats. One can recognise the kind of elements that attracted the admira-
tion of Samuel Beckett: the often-solitary figures, ghostly rather than cor-
poreal, inhabiting desolate, non-specific landscapes, their purpose or
intentions less than clear.26 These later works, with their loose and exuber-
ant approach to figure and colour, do indeed seem unrelated in most
respects to the illustration and cartoon work, and are certainly less so than
were the paintings of the 1920s. One element identified by Hilary Pyle
which does suggest some continuity is the playful relationship between
text and image evident in the titling of many of his late painting, echoing
one of the key features of comics art, and of the captioning of single-panel
cartoons. His titles could be enigmatic or open to multiple interpreta-
tions, as in the case of There Is No Night (1949), the words revealing hid-
den potentials in the image. In other instances he borrowed lines from
pre-existing sources, setting up evocative intertextual links to, for exam-
ple, traditional balladry, as in the case of Rise Up Willy Reilly (1945).27 He
was creatively active until late in life and produced a substantial number of
important paintings in his seventies.
Jack B. Yeats died in Dublin on 28 March 1957, at the age of eighty-­
five, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Harold’s Cross. At
that point it had been about two decades since he had been regularly con-
tributing to Punch, and two more decades prior to that when he had
contributed his last strip to the comic papers. While avoiding, I hope, the
attraction of an excessively neat and reductive view of his career, it is pos-
sible, broadly speaking, to divide Yeats’ artistic life into two reasonably
22 M. CONNERTY

distinct halves. During the first of these he was primarily engaged in black
and white work that appeared in popular media, in the form of illustration,
cartoons, and comic strips, and in the second half he became preoccupied
with oil painting and operated primarily within the quite different context
of the art world. There is of course plenty of slippage and overlap between
these two periods, as well as a significant thread of artistic independence
and idiosyncrasy common to both.
Following his death (and to a certain degree before it), Jack Yeats
increasingly came to be identified with the Irish nation in a way that
defined the reception of his art. For Róisín Kennedy, “his reputation is,
and has always been, inextricably bound up with Irish nationalism,” and
debates around this have informed much of the critical interrogation of his
work.28 While a certain amount of criticism has taken his nationalist status
for granted, much recent writing has tended to problematise this notion
with regards to Yeats,29 partly following a reassessment of nationalism in
twentieth-century Irish art more generally. Art historian S.B. Kennedy
asserts that Yeats, “who is often cast as the painter of revolutionary Ireland,
was really an observer, there was nothing prescriptive in his work.”30
Indeed Yeats himself was publicly reticent about his politics, and held
strong views around the separation of art from the artist’s biography.31
Cyril Barrett suggests that there was an absence of political nationalism in
Irish art generally, certainly prior to the Easter Rising and the War of
Independence.32 He considers that Yeats produced a nationalistic art to
the extent that he focused on and celebrated the lives of ordinary Irish
people, and points, as have other commentators, to a number of paintings
that, albeit tangentially, deal with political events in Ireland during the
years of revolutionary turmoil and civil war. Yeats was one of a relatively
small number of artists who satisfied the desire on the part of Irish art crit-
ics and cultural commentators to establish the grounds for a definitively
Irish art, just as a sense of nationalist self-determination was sought in
other areas of contemporary cultural and social life during the decades fol-
lowing independence. This critical emphasis on the issue of Yeats’ nation-
alism and his relationship to Ireland has tended to obscure his substantial
contribution to British popular culture during the early decades of
his career.
Another random document with
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who again assured the Emperor of his complete devotion. His
Majesty then left for the Forbidden City, intending to carry out his
plans against the Empress from there rather than from the Summer
Palace, where nearly every eunuch was a spy in her service.
It is evident that, so far, the Emperor by no means despaired of his
chances of success, as two Decrees were issued next morning, one
ordering the teaching of European languages in the public schools,
and the other requiring purer administration on the part of district
magistrates.
On the morning of the 5th, Yüan Shih-k’ai had a final audience,
before leaving for Tientsin. His Majesty received him in the Palace of
Heavenly Purity (Ch’ien Ch’ing Kung) of the Forbidden City. Every
precaution was taken to prevent the conversation being overheard.
Seated for the last time on the great lacquered Dragon Throne, so
soon to be reoccupied by the Empress Dowager, in the gloomy
throne room which the morning light could scarcely penetrate, His
Majesty told Yüan Shih-k’ai the details of the commission with which
he had decided to entrust him. He was to put Jung Lu to death and
then, returning immediately to the capital with the troops under his
command, to seize and imprison the Empress Dowager. The
Emperor gave him a small arrow, the symbol of his authority to carry
out the Imperial orders, and bade him proceed with all haste to
Tientsin, there to arrest Jung Lu in his Yamên and see to his instant
decapitation. Kuang Hsü also handed him a Decree whereby, upon
completion of his mission, he was appointed Viceroy of Chihli ad
interim, and ordered to Peking for further audience.
Yüan promised faithful obedience, and, without speaking to
anyone, left Peking by the first train. Meantime the Old Buddha was
due to come in from the I-ho Yüan to the Winter Palace that morning
at 8 o’clock, to perform sacrifice at the altar to the God of Silkworms,
and the Emperor dutifully repaired to the Ying Hsiu Gate of the
Western Park, where the Lake Palace is situated, to receive Her
Majesty as she entered the precincts.
Yüan reached Tientsin before noon, and proceeded at once to
Jung Lu’s Yamên. He asked Jung Lu whether he regarded him as a
faithful blood brother. (The two men had taken the oath of
brotherhood several years before.) “Of course I do,” replied the
Viceroy. “You well may, for the Emperor has sent me to kill you, and
instead, I now betray his scheme, because of my loyalty to the
Empress Dowager and of my affection for you.” Jung Lu, apparently
unaffected by the message, merely expressed surprise that the Old
Buddha could have been kept in ignorance of all these things, and
added that he would go at once to the capital and see the Empress
Dowager that same evening. Yüan handed him the Emperor’s
Decree, and Jung Lu, travelling by special train, reached Peking
soon after 5 p.m.
He went directly to the Lake Palace, and entered the Empress’s
residence, boldly disregarding the strict etiquette which forbids any
provincial official from visiting the capital without a special summons
by Edict, and the still stricter rules that guard the entrée, of the
Palace. Un-ushered he entered the Empress’s presence, and
kowtowing thrice, exclaimed, “Sanctuary, your Majesty!” “What
sanctuary do you require in the Forbidden precincts, where no harm
can come to you, and where you have no right to be?” replied the
Old Buddha. Jung Lu proceeded to lay before her all the details of
the plot. Grasping the situation and rising immediately to its
necessities with the courage and masculine intelligence that enabled
her to overcome all obstacles, she directed him to send word
secretly to the leaders of the Conservative party, summoning them to
immediate audience in the Palace by the Lake. (The Emperor was
still in the Forbidden City.) In less than two hours the whole of the
Grand Council, several of the Manchu princes and nobles (Prince
Ch’ing, with his usual fine “flair” for a crisis, had applied for sick leave
and was therefore absent) and the high officials of the Boards,
including the two Ministers whom the Emperor had cashiered (Hsü
Ying-ku’ei and Huai Ta Pu) were assembled in the presence of the
Empress. On their knees, the assembled officials besought her to
resume the reins of government and to save their ancient Empire
from the evils of a barbarian civilisation. It was speedily arranged
that the guards in the Forbidden City should be replaced by men
from Jung Lu’s own corps, and that, in the meantime, he should
return to his post in Tientsin and await further orders. The
conference broke up at about midnight. The Emperor was due to
enter the Chung Ho Hall of the Palace at 5.30 the next morning to
peruse the litany drawn up by the Board of Rites, which he was to
recite next day at the autumnal sacrifice to the Tutelary Deities. After
leaving that hall, he was seized by the guards and eunuchs,
conveyed to the Palace on the small island in the middle of the lake
(the “Ocean Terrace”) and informed that the Empress Dowager
would visit him later. The following Decree was thereupon issued by
the Empress Dowager in the Emperor’s name:—

“The nation is now passing through a crisis, and wise

guidance is needed in all branches of the public service. We
ourselves have laboured diligently, night and day, to perform
Our innumerable duties, but in spite of all Our anxious
energy and care We are in constant fear lest delay should be
the undoing of the country. We now respectfully recall the fact
that Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Dowager has on two
occasions since the beginning of the reign of H. M. T’ung-
Chih, performed the functions of Regent, and that in her
administrations of the Government she displayed complete
and admirable qualities of perfection which enabled her
successfully to cope with every difficulty that arose.
Recollecting the serious burden of the responsibility We owe
to Our ancestors and to the nation, We have repeatedly
besought Her Majesty to condescend once more to
administer the Government. Now she has graciously
honoured Us by granting Our prayer, a blessing indeed for all
Our subjects. From this day forth Her Majesty will transact
the business of Government in the side hall of the Palace,
and on the day after to-morrow We ourselves at the head of
Our Princes and Ministers shall perform obeisance before
Her in the Hall of Diligent Government. The Yamêns
concerned shall respectfully make the arrangements
necessary for this ceremonial. The words of the Emperor.”
 Another Decree followed close upon the above, cashiering the
Censor Sung Po-lu, on the ground of his generally evil reputation
and recommendation of bad characters (i.e., the reformer Liang Ch’i-
ch’ao). The Empress had a special grudge against this Censor
because he had ventured to impeach her morals in a recent
memorial, but as he had taken no part in the conspiracy against her
person she spared his life.

Circular Throne Hall in the Grounds of the Lake Palace looted by Allied
Troops in 1900.

Photo, Betines, Peking.

 Pavilion on Lake to the West of Forbidden City.

Photo, Betines, Peking.

Tzŭ Hsi in due course proceeded to the “Ocean Terrace,”

accompanied only by Li Lien-ying, who had been ordered to replace
the Emperor’s eunuchs by creatures of his own. (Kuang Hsü’s
former attendants were either put to death or banished to the post
roads.) A Manchu who heard an account of the interview from Duke
Kuei Hsiang, Tz’u Hsi’s younger brother, is our authority for what
occurred at this dramatic meeting. The Empress Dowager bluntly
informed Kuang Hsü that she had decided to spare his life and, for
the present at any rate, to allow him to retain the throne. He would,
however, be kept henceforward under strict surveillance, and every
word of his would be reported to her. As to his schemes of reform,
which at first she had encouraged, little dreaming to what depths of
folly his infatuate presumption would lead him, they would all be
repealed. How dared he forget what great benefits he owed her, his
elevation to the throne and her generosity in allowing him to
administer the government, he a poor puppet, who had no right to be
Emperor at all, and whom she could unmake at will? There was not,
she said, a single Manchu in high place but wished his removal, and
urged her to resume the Regency. True, he had sympathisers among
the Chinese, traitors all; with them she would deal in due course.
Kuang Hsü’s secondary consort (the Chen Fei or Pearl Concubine,
the only one of his wives with whom he seems to have been on
affectionate terms) knelt then before Tzŭ Hsi, imploring her to spare
the Emperor further reproaches. She actually dared to suggest that
he was, after all, the lawful Sovereign and that not even the Empress
Dowager could set aside the mandate of Heaven. Tzŭ Hsi angrily
dismissed her from the Presence, ordering her to be confined in
another part of the Palace, where she remained until, in 1900, there
came an opportunity in which the vindictive Empress took summary
revenge on the presumptuous concubine.[56]
The Empress Consort, with whom Kuang Hsü was hardly on
speaking terms, was commanded to remain with him. She, as Tzŭ
Hsi’s niece, could be trusted to spy upon the Emperor and report all
his doings. He was allowed to see no one but her and the eunuchs in
attendance, except in the presence of the Empress Dowager.
To the end of his life Kuang Hsü blamed Yüan Shih-k’ai, and him
alone, for having betrayed him. To Yüan he owed his humiliation, the
end of all his cherished plans of government and the twenty-three
months of solitary confinement which he had to endure on the
“Ocean Terrace.” Almost his last words, as he lay dying, were to bid
his brothers remember his long agony and promise to be revenged
upon the author of his undoing. Of Jung Lu he said that it was but
natural that he should consider first his duty to the Empress
Dowager and seek to warn her; and, after all, as he had planned
Jung Lu’s death, he could hardly expect from him either devotion or
loyalty. The Old Buddha’s resentment was also natural; he had
plotted against her and failed. But Yüan Shih-k’ai had solemnly
sworn loyalty and obedience. The Emperor never willingly spoke to
him again, even when, as Viceroy of Chihli, Yüan came to the height
of his power.
To-day Yüan lives in retirement, and under the constant shadow of
fear; for the Emperor’s brother, the Regent, has kept his promise.
Such are the intricate humanities of the inner circle around and
about the Dragon Throne, the never-ending problem of the human
equation as a factor in the destinies of peoples.
 XV
TZŬ HSI RESUMES THE REGENCY (1898)

Kuang Hsü’s reign was over; there remained to him only the
Imperial title. He had had his chance; in the enthusiasm of youth and
new ideas he had played a desperate game against the powers of
darkness in high places, and he had lost. Once more, as after the
death of T’ung-Chih, Tzŭ Hsi could make a virtue of her satisfied
ambitions. She had given her nephew a free hand, she had retired
from the field, leaving him to steer the ship of State: if he had now
steered it into troublous and dangerous seas, if, by common
consent, she were again called to take the helm, this was the doing
of Heaven and no fault of hers. She could no more be blamed for
Kuang Hsü’s folly than for the vicious habits and premature death of
her son, which had brought her back to power 23 years before. It
was clear (and there were many voices to reassure her of the fact)
that the stars in their courses were working for the continuance of
her unfettered authority, and that any trifling assistance which she
might have given them would not be too closely scrutinised.
Kuang Hsü’s reign was over; but his person (frail, melancholy
tenement) remained, and Tzŭ Hsi was never enamoured of half
measures or ambiguous positions. From the day when the pitiful
monarch entered his pavilion prison on the “Ocean Terrace,” she
began to make arrangements for his “mounting the Dragon” and
“visiting the Nine Springs” in the orthodox classical manner, and for
providing the Throne with another occupant whose youth,
connections and docility would enable her to hold the Regency
indefinitely. Nevertheless, because of the turbulent temper of the
southern provinces and possible manifestations of Europe’s curious
sympathy with the Emperor’s Utopian dreams, she realised the
necessity for proceeding with caution and decorum. It was commonly
reported throughout the city in the beginning of October that the
Emperor would die with the end of the Chinese year.
Kuang Hsü was a prisoner in his Palace, doomed, as he well
knew; yet must he play the puppet Son of Heaven and perform each
season’s appointed posturings. On the 8th day of the 8th Moon he
appeared therefore, as ordered by his attendants, and in the
presence of his whole Court performed the nine prostrations and
other proper acts of obeisance before Her Majesty Tzŭ Hsi, in
recognition of his own nonentity and her supreme authority. In the
afternoon, escorted by a strong detachment of Jung Lu’s troops, he
went from the Lake Palace to sacrifice at the Altar of the Moon.
Thus, pending the coup-de-grâce, the wretched Emperor went
through the empty ceremonies of State ritual; high priest, that was
himself to be the next victim, how bitter must have been his thoughts
as he was borne back with Imperial pomp and circumstance to his
lonely place of humiliation!
Tzŭ Hsi then settled down to her work of government, returning to
it with a zest by no means diminished by the years spent in retreat.
And first she must justify the policy of reaction to herself, to her high
officials, and the world at large. She must get rid of offenders and
surround herself with men after her own heart.
A few days after the Autumn festival and the Emperor’s
melancholy excursion, Her Majesty proceeded to remind the Imperial
Clansmen that their position would not protect them against the
consequences of disloyalty; she was always much exercised
(remembering the Tsai Yüan conspiracy) at any sign of intriguing
amongst her Manchu kinsmen. In this case her warning took the
form of a Decree in which she sentenced the “Beileh” Tsai Ch’u[57] to
perpetual confinement in the “Empty Chamber” of the Clan Court.
Tsai Ch’u had had the audacity to sympathise with the Emperor’s
reform schemes; he had also had the bad luck to marry one of Tzŭ
Hsi’s nieces and to be upon the worst of terms with her. When
therefore he advised the Emperor, in the beginning of the Hundred
Days, to put a stop, once and for all, to the Old Buddha’s
interference in State affairs, the “mean one of his inner chamber” did
not fail to report the fact to Her Majesty, and thus to enlist her
sympathies and activities, from the outset, on the side of the
reactionaries.
At the time immediately following the coup d’état, public opinion at
the Capital was divided as to the merits of the Emperor’s proposed
reforms and the wisdom of their suppression, but the political
instincts of the tribute-fed metropolis are, generally speaking,
dormant, and what it chiefly respects is the energetic display of
power. So that, on the whole, sympathy was with the Old Buddha.
She had, moreover, a Bismarckian way of guiding public opinion, of
directing undercurrents of information through the eunuchs and tea-
house gossip, in a manner calculated to appeal to the instincts of the
literati and the bourgeois; in the present instance stress was laid on
the Emperor’s lack of filial piety, as proved by his plotting against his
aged and august aunt (a thing unpardonable in the eyes of the
orthodox Confucianist), and on the fact that he enjoyed the sympathy
and support of foreigners—an argument sufficient to damn him in the
eyes of even the most progressive Chinese. It came, therefore, to be
the generally accepted opinion that His Majesty had shown
deplorable want of judgment and self-control, and that the Empress
Dowager was fully justified in resuming control of the government.
This opinion even came to be accepted and expressed by those
Legations which had originally professed to see in the Emperor’s
reforms the dawn of a new era for China. So elastic is diplomacy in
following the line of the least resistance, so adroit (in the absence of
a policy of its own) in accepting and condoning any fait accompli,
that it was not long before the official attitude of the Legations—
including the British—had come to deprecate the Emperor’s
unfortunate haste in introducing reforms, reforms which every
foreigner in China had urged for years, and which, accepted in
principle by the Empress since 1900, have again been welcomed as
proof of China’s impending regeneration. In June 1898, the British
Minister had seen in the Emperor’s Reform Edicts proof that “the
Court had at last thoroughly recognised a real need for radical
reform.”[58] In October, when the Chief Reformer (K’ang Yu-wei) had
been saved from Tzŭ Hsi’s vengeance by the British Consul-General
at Shanghai and conveyed by a British warship to the protection of a
British Colony (under the mistaken impression that England would
actively intervene in the cause of progress and on grounds of self-
interest if not of humanity), we find the tide of expediency turned to
recognition of the fact that “the Empress Dowager and the Manchu
party were seriously alarmed for their own safety, and looked upon
the Reform movement as inimical to Manchu rule”![58] And two
months later, influenced no doubt by the impending season of peace
and good will, the Marquess of Salisbury is seriously informed by Sir
Claude Macdonald that the wives of the foreign Representatives,
seven in all, had been received in audience by the Empress
Dowager on the anniversary of her sixty-fourth birthday, and that Her
Majesty “made a most favourable impression, both by the personal
interest she took in all her guests and by her courteous
amiability.”[58] On which occasion the puppet Emperor was exhibited,
to comply with the formalities, and was made to shake hands with all
the ladies. And so the curtain was rung down, and the Reform play
ended, to the satisfaction of all (or nearly all) concerned.
Nevertheless, the British Minister and others, disturbed at the
persistent rumours that “the Empress Dowager was about to
proceed to extreme steps in regard to the Emperor,”[58] went so far
as to warn the Chinese Government against anything so disturbing
to the European sense of fitness and decency. Foreign countries, the
Yamên was told, would view with displeasure and alarm his sudden
demise. When the news of the British Minister’s intervention became
known in the tea-houses and recorded in the Press, much
indignation was expressed: this was a purely domestic question, for
which precedents existed in plenty and in which foreigners’ advice
was inadmissible. The Emperor’s acceptance of new-fangled foreign
ideas was a crime in the eyes of the Manchus, but his enlistment of
foreign sympathy and support was hateful to Manchus and Chinese
alike.
Matters soon settled down, however, into the old well-worn
grooves, the people satisfied and even glad in the knowledge that
the Old Buddha was once more at the helm. In the capital the news
had been sedulously spread—in order to prepare the way for the
impending drama of expiation—that Kuang Hsü had planned to
murder Her Majesty, and his present punishment was therefore
regarded as mild beyond his deserts.[59] Scholars, composing
essays appropriate to the occasion, freely compared His Majesty to
that Emperor of the Tang Dynasty (a.d. 762) who had instigated the
murdering of the Empress Dowager of his day. Kuang Hsü’s death
was therefore freely predicted and its effects discounted; there is no
doubt that it would have caused little or no comment in the north of
China, however serious its consequences might have been in the
south. The public mind having been duly prepared, the Empress
Dowager, in the name of the prospective victim, issued a Decree
stating that the Son of Heaven was seriously ill; no surprise or
apprehension was expressed, and the sending of competent
physicians from the provinces to attend His Majesty was recognised
as a necessary concession to formalities. “Ever since the 4th Moon,”
said this Decree (i.e., since the beginning of the hundred days of
reform), “I have been grievously ill; nor can I find any alleviation of
my sickness.” It was the pro formâ announcement of his impending
despatch, and as such it was received by the Chinese people.
Amongst the doctors summoned to attend His Majesty was Ch’en
Lien-fang, for many years the most celebrated physician in China.
The following account of his experiences at the capital and the
nature of his duties, was supplied by himself at the time, to one of
the writers, for publication in The Times.

“When the Edict was issued calling upon the provincial

Viceroys and Governors to send native doctors of distinction
to Peking to advise in regard to the Emperor’s illness, Chen
Lien-fang received orders from the Governor at Soochow to
leave for the north without delay. This in itself, apart from the
uncongenial and unremunerative nature of the duty (of which
Ch’en was well aware), was no light undertaking for a man of
delicate physique whose age was over three score years and
ten; but there was no possibility of evading the task. He
according left his large practice in the charge of two
confidential assistants, or pupils, and, having received from
the Governor a sum of 6,000 taels for travelling expenses and
remuneration in advance, made his way to Peking and
reported for duty to the Grand Council. When he arrived
there, he found three other native physicians of considerable
repute already in attendance, summoned in obedience to the
Imperial commands. Dr. Déthève, of the French Legation, had
already paid his historical visit to the Emperor, and his
remarkable diagnosis of the Son of Heaven’s symptoms was
still affording amusement to the Legations. The aged native
physician spoke in undisguised contempt both of the French
doctor’s comments on the case and of his suggestions for its
treatment. His own description of the Emperor’s malady was
couched in language not unlike that which writers of historical
novels attribute to the physicians of Europe in the Middle
Ages; he spoke reverently of influence and vapours at work in
the august person of his Sovereign, learnedly of heat-
flushings and their occult causes, and plainly of things which
are more suited to Chinese than to British readers.
Nevertheless, his description pointed clearly to disease of the
respiratory organs—which he said had existed for over twelve
years—to general debility, and to a feverish condition which
he ascribed to mental anxiety combined with physical
weakness. Before he left Peking (about the middle of
November) the fever had abated and the patient’s symptoms
had decidedly improved; the case was, however, in his
opinion, of so serious a nature that he decided to leave it, if
possible, in the hands of his younger confrères—an object
which by dint of bribing certain Court officials he eventually
achieved. Asked if he considered the Emperor’s condition
critical, he replied oracularly that if he lived to see the Chinese
New Year his strength would thereafter return gradually with
the spring, and the complete restoration of his health might be
expected.
“Some few days after his arrival in Peking, Ch’en was
summoned to audience by orders conveyed through a
member of the Grand Council; the Emperor and the Dowager
Empress were awaiting his visit in a hall on the south side of
the Palace. The consultation was curiously indicative of the
divinity which hedges about the ruler of the Middle Kingdom;
suggestive, too, of the solidity of that conservatism which
dictates the inner policy of China. Ch’en entered the presence
of his Sovereign on his knees, crossing the apartment in that
position, after the customary kowtows. The Emperor and the
Dowager Empress were seated at opposite sides of a low
table on the daïs, and faced each other in that position during
the greater part of the interview. The Emperor appeared pale
and listless, had a troublesome irritation of the throat, and
was evidently feverish; the thin oval of his face, clearly
defined features, and aquiline nose gave him, in the
physician’s eyes (to use his own words), the appearance of a
foreigner. The Empress, who struck him as an extremely well-
preserved and intelligent-looking woman, seemed to be
extremely solicitous as to the patient’s health and careful for
his comfort. As it would have been a serious breach of
etiquette for the physician to ask any questions of His
Majesty, the Empress proceeded to describe his symptoms,
the invalid occasionally signifying confirmation of what was
said by a word or a nod. During this monologue, the
physician, following the customary procedure at Imperial
audiences, kept his gaze concentrated upon the floor until, at
the command of the Empress, and still kneeling, he was
permitted to place one hand upon the Emperor’s wrist. There
was no feeling of the pulse; simply contact with the flat of the
hand, first on one side of the wrist and then on the other. This
done, the Empress continued her narrative of the patient’s
sufferings; she described the state of his tongue and the
symptoms of ulceration in the mouth and throat, but as it was
not permissible for the doctor to examine these, he was
obliged to make the best of a somewhat unprofessional
description. As he wisely observed, it is difficult to look at a
patient’s tongue when his exalted rank compels you to keep
your eyes fixed rigidly on the floor. The Empress having
concluded her remarks on the case, Ch’en was permitted to
withdraw and to present to the Grand Council his diagnosis,
together with advice as to future treatment, which was
 subsequently communicated officially to the Throne. The gist
of his advice was to prescribe certain tonics of the orthodox
native type and to suggest the greatest possible amount of
mental and physical rest.”[60]

The aged physician’s oracular forecast was justified. The Emperor

lived to see the New Year and thereafter to regain his strength, a
result due in some degree to the Empress Dowager’s genuine fear
of foreign intervention, but chiefly to her recognition of the strength of
public opinion against her in the south of China and of the
expediency of conciliating it. In the Kuang provinces there was no
doubt of the bitterly anti-Manchu feeling aroused by the execution of
the Cantonese reformers: these turbulent southerners were fierce
and loud in their denunciations of the Manchus and all their works,
and it would not have required much to fan the flames of a new and
serious rebellion. The south was well aware, for news travels swiftly
in China, that the Emperor’s life was in danger and that the close of
the year was the time fixed for his death, and from all sides protests
and words of warning came pouring from the provinces to the
capital, addressed not only to the metropolitan boards but to the
Throne itself. Amongst these was a telegram signed by a certain
Prefect of Shanghai named Ching Yüan-shan, who, in the name of
“all the gentry, scholars, merchants and public of Shanghai,” referred
to the Edict which announced the Emperor’s illness and implored the
Empress, the Clansmen and the Grand Council to permit his sacred
Majesty to resume the government “notwithstanding his
indisposition,” and to abandon all thoughts of his abdication. He
described the province of Kiangsu as being in a state of suppressed
ferment and frankly alluded to the probability of foreigners
intervening in the event of the Emperor’s death. Tzŭ Hsi was much
incensed with this courageous official, not because he actually
accused her of premeditating murder, but because he dared threaten
her with its consequences. She gave orders that he be summarily
cashiered, whereupon, fearing further manifestations of her wrath,
he fled to Macao. But his bold words undoubtedly contributed to
saving the Emperor’s life.
 Of all the high provincial authorities, one only was found brave and
disinterested enough to speak on behalf of the Emperor; this was Liu
K’un-yi, the Viceroy of Nanking. He was too big a man to be publicly
rebuked at a time like this and Tzŭ Hsi professed to admire his
disinterested courage; but she was highly incensed at his action,
which contrasted strongly with the astute opportunism of his
colleague, the scholarly magnate Chang Chih-tung, Viceroy of
Wuch’ang, who had been an ardent advocate of the reformers so
long as the wind blew fair in that quarter. Only six months before he
had recommended several progressives (amongst them his own
secretary, Yang Jui) to the Emperor’s notice, and just before the
storm burst he had been summoned to Peking by Kuang Hsü to
support His Majesty’s policy as a member of the Grand Council. No
sooner had the Empress Dowager declared herself on the side of the
reactionaries, however, and the Emperor had failed in his attempt to
win over Yüan Shih-k’ai and his troops, than Chang telegraphed to
the Old Buddha warmly approving her policy, and urging strong
measures against the reformers. The advice was superfluous; Tzŭ
Hsi, having put her hand to the plough, was not the woman to
remove it before her work was well done.
On the 11th day of the 8th Moon, she summoned Jung Lu to the
capital to assist her in stamping out the reform movement. The
Board of Punishments had just sent in a memorial urging the
appointment of an Imperial Commission for the trial of K’ang Yu-
wei’s colleagues. Tzŭ Hsi, in reply, directed them to act in
consultation with the Grand Council and to cross-examine the
prisoners “with the utmost severity.” At the same time she ordered
the imprisonment in the Board’s gaol of Chang Yin-huan,[61] the
Emperor’s trusted adviser and friend who, she observed, “bears an
abominable reputation.” This Edict took occasion to state that the
Throne, anxious to temper justice with mercy, would refrain from any
general proscription or campaign of revenge, “although fully aware
that many prominent scholars and officials had allowed themselves
to be corrupted by the reformers.”
The Empress’s next step, advised by Jung Lu, was to issue a
Decree, in the name of the Emperor, in which she justified the policy
of reaction and reassured the Conservative party. The document is
an excellent example of her methods. While the Emperor is made to
appear as convinced of the error of his ways, all blame for the
“feelings of apprehension” created by the reform movement is
relegated to “our officials’ failure to give effect to our orders in the
proper way,” so that everybody’s “face” is saved. The following
abridged translation is of permanent interest, for the same
arguments are in use to-day and will undoubtedly be required
hereafter, when the Manchus come to deal with the impending
problems of Constitutional Government:—

“The original object of the Throne in introducing reforms in

the administration of the government was to increase the
strength of our Empire and to ameliorate the condition of our
subjects. It was no sudden whim for change, nor any
contempt for tradition that actuated us; surely our subjects
must recognise that our action was fully justifiable and indeed
inevitable. Nevertheless, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact
that feelings of apprehension have been aroused, entirely due
to the failure of our officials to give effect to our orders in the
proper way, and that this again has led to the dissemination of
wild rumours and wrong ideas amongst the ignorant masses
of the people. For instance, when we abolished six
superfluous government boards, we did so in the public
interest, but the immediate result has been that we have been
plagued with Memorials suggesting that we should destroy
and reconstruct the whole system of administration. It is
evident that, unless we explain our policy as a whole, great
danger may arise from the spread of such ideas, and to
prevent any such result we now command that the six
metropolitan departments which we previously abolished be
re-established exactly as before. Again, our original intention
in authorising the establishment of official newspapers, and
allowing all and sundry of our subjects to address us, was to
encourage the spread of knowledge and to improve our own
sources of intelligence. Unfortunately, however, the right of
addressing the Throne has been greatly abused, and the
 suggestions which have reached us in this way have not only
been trivial and useless on many occasions, but have recently
shown a tendency towards revolutionary propaganda. For this
reason the right to memorialise the Throne will in future be
strictly reserved in accordance with the established and
ancient custom. As for official newspapers, we have come to
the conclusion that they are quite useless for any purposes of
the government, and that they only lead to popular discontent;
they are therefore abolished from this day forth. The proper
training grounds for national industry and talent are Colleges,
and these are to go on as before, it being the business of the
local officials, acting upon public opinion in their respective
districts, to continue the improvement of education on the
lines laid down; but there is to be no conversion of temples
and shrines into schools, as was previously ordered, because
this might lead to strong objection on the part of the people.
Generally speaking, there shall be no measures taken
contrary to the established order of things throughout the
Empire. The times are critical, and it behoves us, therefore, to
follow in government matters the happy mean and to avoid all
extreme measures and abuses. It is our duty, without
prejudice, to steer a middle course, and it is for you, our
officials, to aim at permanence and stability of administration
in every branch of the government.”

Jung Lu was now raised to membership of the Grand Council, and

given supreme command of the northern forces and control of the
Board of War; he thus became the most powerful official in the
Empire, holding a position for which no precedent existed in the
annals of the Manchu Dynasty. He had once more proved loyal to
the Empress and faithful to the woman whom he had served since
the days of the flight to Jehol; and he had his reward. It was natural,
if not inevitable, that the part played by Jung Lu in the crisis of the
coup d’état should expose him to severe criticism, especially abroad;
but, from the Chinese official’s point of view, his action in supporting
the Empress Dowager against her nephew, the Emperor, was
nothing more than his duty, and as a statesman he showed himself
consistently moderate, sensible, and reliable. The denunciations
subsequently poured upon him by the native and foreign Press at the
time of the Boxer rising were the result, partly of the unrefuted
falsehoods disseminated by K’ang Yu-wei and his followers, and
partly of the Legations’ prejudice (thence arising) and lack of
accurate information. As will hereafter be shown, all his efforts were
directed towards stemming the tide of that fanatical outbreak and
restraining his Imperial mistress from acts of folly. Amidst the
cowardice, ignorance and cruelty of the Manchu Clansmen his
foresight and courage stand out steadily in welcome relief; the only
servant of the Throne during Tzŭ Hsi’s long rule who approaches
him in administrative ability and disinterested patriotism is Tseng
Kuo-fan (of whose career a brief account has already been given).
From this time forward until his death (1903) we find him ever at Tzŭ
Hsi’s right hand, her most trusted and efficient adviser; and her
choice was well made. As will be seen in a later chapter, there was a
time in 1900, when the Old Buddha, distraught by the tumult and the
shouting, misled by her own hopes, her superstitious beliefs and the
clamorous advice of her kinsfolk, allowed Prince Tuan and his fellow
fanatics to undermine for a little while Jung Lu’s influence.
Nevertheless (as will be seen by the diary of Ching Shan) it was to
him that she always turned, in the last resort, for counsel and
comfort; it was on him that she leaned in the dark hour of final
defeat,—and he never failed her. She lived to realise that the advice
which he gave, and which she sometimes neglected, was invariably
sound. Amidst all the uncertainties of recent Chinese history this
much is certain, that the memory of Jung Lu deserves a far higher
place in the esteem of his countrymen and of foreigners than it has
hitherto received. Unaware himself of many of the calumnies that
had been circulated about him at the time of the Court’s flight, he
was greatly hurt, and his sense of justice outraged, by the cold
reception given him by the Legations after the Court’s return to
Peking. Thereafter, until his death, he was wont to say to his intimate
friends that while he would never regret the stand he had taken
against the Boxers, he could not understand or forgive the hostility
and ingratitude shown him by foreigners. “It was not for love towards
them,” he observed, on one occasion recorded, “that he had acted
as he did, but only because of his devotion to the Empress Dowager
and the Manchu Dynasty; nevertheless, since his action had
coincided with the interests of the foreigner, he was entitled to some
credit for it.”
The Empress Dowager consulted long and earnestly with Jung Lu
as to the punishment to be inflicted upon the reformers. He
advocated strong measures of repression, holding that the prestige
of the Manchu Dynasty was involved. The six prisoners were
examined by the Board of Punishments, and Jung Lu closely
questioned them as to K’ang Yu-wei’s intentions in regard to the
Empress Dowager. Documents found in K’ang’s house had revealed
every detail of the plot, and upon the Grand Council recommended
the execution of all the prisoners. There being no doubt that they had
been guilty of high treason against Her Majesty, it seemed clearly
inadvisable to prolong the trial, especially as there was undoubtedly
a risk of widening the breach between Manchus and Chinese by any
delay in the proceedings, at a time when party spirit was running
high on both sides. The Old Buddha concurred in the decision of the
Grand Council, desiring to terminate the crisis as soon as possible;
accordingly, on the 13th day of the Moon, the reformers were
executed. They met their death bravely, their execution outside the
city being witnessed by an immense crowd. It was reported that
amongst the papers of Yang Jui were found certain highly
compromising letters addressed to him by the Emperor himself, in
which the Empress Dowager was bitterly denounced. There was
also a Memorial by Yang impeaching Her Majesty for gross
immorality and illicit relations with several persons in high positions,
one of whom was Jung Lu; this document had been annotated in red
ink by the Emperor himself. It quoted songs and ballads current in
the city of Canton, referring to Her Majesty’s alleged vicious
practices, and warned the Emperor that, if the Manchu dynasty
should come now to its end, the fault would lie as much with Tzŭ Hsi
and her evil deeds as was the case when the Shang dynasty (of the
12th Century b.c.) fell by reason of the Emperor Chou Hsin’s
infatuation for his concubine Ta Chi, whose orgies are recorded in
history. Yang Jui had compared the Empress Dowager’s life at the
Summer Palace with the enormities committed by this infamous
concubine in her palace by the “Lake of Wine”; small wonder then,
said Tzŭ Hsi’s advocates in defence of drastic measures, that,
having seen for herself, in the Emperor’s own handwriting, that these
treasonable utterances met with his favour and support, Her Majesty
was vindictively inclined and determined to put an end, once and for
all, to his relations with the Reform party.
The edict which ordered the execution of the Reform leaders was
drafted by the Empress Dowager herself with the aid of Jung Lu, but
with cynical irony it was issued in the name of the Emperor. It was
written in red ink as an indication of its special importance, a
formality usually reserved for decrees given by the Sovereign under
his own hand. After laying stress upon the necessity for introducing
reforms in the country’s administration, and on the anxiety felt by the
Throne in regard to the increasing difficulties of government, this
Decree proceeded to state that K’ang Yu-wei and his followers,
taking advantage of the necessities of the moment, had entered into
a rebellious conspiracy, aiming at the overthrow of the Throne itself;
fortunately, their treacherous intentions had been disclosed, and the
whole plot revealed. The Decree continued as followed:—

“We are further informed that, greatly daring, these traitors

have organised a secret Society, the objects of which are to
overthrow the Manchu dynasty for the benefit of the Chinese.
Following the precepts of the Sages, We, the Emperor, are in
duty bound to propagate filial piety as the foremost of all
virtues, and have always done so, as our subjects must be
fully aware. But the writings of K’ang Yu-wei were, in their
tendency, depraved and immoral; they contain nothing but
abominable doctrines intended to flout and destroy the
doctrines of the Sages. Originally impressed by his
knowledge of contemporary politics, we appointed him to be a
Secretary of the Tsungli Yamên, and subsequently gave him
charge of the establishment of the proposed official
newspaper at Shanghai; but instead of going to his post, he
remained for the purposes of his evil conspiracies at Peking.
Had it not been that, by the protecting influences of our