Popular Pen Name? "Humphrey Thwackum"
Did you know that we have boxes and drawers full of political cartoons here in Local Studies from throughout the Victorian period and beyond? There’s even a small number that predate Queen Victoria’s reign. These are dated 1832 and 1835 and are drawn by a talented if slightly awkward hand and clearly refer to the Parliamentary elections in Halifax during those years. 1832 was a big year – in fact it was THE year, as in the first year that Halifax existed as its own Parliamentary borough following the Reform Act 1832. That year it was entitled to return two MPs, and the seat was hard fought for (although it would not be as difficult an election as the 1835 election, which returned not just two MPs but also allegations of bribery and intimidation of shopkeepers by the working classes...that’s a tale for another time though!)
The cartoons in question here are all signed, apart from one or two who are still unmistakably drawn by the same hand, by “Humphrey Thwackum the Elder, Esq.”. Some readers may say, oh, that Humphrey Thwackum, thinking of the slew of cartoons produced in the 1850s through to the 1870s which are attributed to election agent and later alderman Joseph Sugden. But are they the same Humphrey? Are they the same artist? Why are we even asking that second question? The answer lies in an obituary and in the answer to another question, one with a purely subjective answer: do you believe that two teenage boys could have founded a satirical legend? This post is full of questions and not many answers, but perhaps you can supply some after reading this...
Joseph Sugden was a drysalter who did very well for himself indeed, also acting as an election agent for Sir Francis Crossley in the Parliamentary election of 1856. It helped that his first wife was a successful widow who ran the Temperance Hotel at Northgate for a few years before and after their marriage! He would also later become a town Alderman and Councillor. When Sugden died in May 1877, after suffering through several years of blindness following a head injury from slipping on ice, his obituary in the Halifax Guardian called him a keen satirist who “by both pen and pencil did much to support his political [Liberal] creed”. It was here that he was first named officially as the man behind Humphrey. However, the Halifax Courier takes it a step further and credits Humphrey’s cartoons to two people!
According to their writer, Sugden was merely the brains behind the cartoons, and it was artist “S. Baldwin” who executed them. S. Baldwin was Sam Baldwin, who had gained fame locally for his exceptional oil portraits, including one painted in 1849 of John Baldwin (no relation!) the first Mayor of Halifax. This painting is now held at Bankfield Museum and they’ve given us permission to reproduce it here.
Left to right: our photograph of the painting, and a colour scan (courtesy of Bankfield Museum)
Baldwin himself died in 1891 and his obituary makes no mention of the cartoons but does relate that his father had tried to train him up as a mechanic but had no luck with it, and it was Judge James Stansfeld who ended up paying for him to have art tuition after visiting the family shop only for the senior Baldwin to say that he “couldn’t keep him at the bench” and that he was “drawing in some corner or another”. The tuition led Baldwin to London, then Paris, then back to London where he found a wife, and finally back to Halifax where he would stay until the late 1870s when he and his family left for Saltaire. Sam’s life has some obvious mysteries in it, like why he was living with his eldest son and marking himself as widowed on the 1881 Census while his very-much-alive wife and children were living elsewhere with her marital status given as married…but as I said, those are obvious mysteries. There’s a bigger mystery here too, and that’s how many of these cartoons he drew.
You’ve presumably read the excerpt further above from Sugden’s obituary and noticed that it refers to the elections involving Wood, Crossley and Edwards, which were in the 1850s not the 1830s. You might not know that the 1850s cartoons are signed “Humphrey Thwack’em the Younger” - note the apostrophe and the e instead of the u, as well as the “younger” suffix rather than “elder”. These are undoubtedly the cartoons being referenced so we can attribute them to Sugden and Baldwin, pending at least one more primary source verification which is yet to be discovered. But cast your eye over these earlier cartoons; look closely at the style of the caricature, at the perspective, the handwriting, the humour of them. In 1832 Sugden was 16 years old and Baldwin was 14. Do these look like the artwork of a very talented 14 year old boy? Well...they kind of do, actually. The 1832 Parliamentary election did in fact return two Whigs and the content of these earlier cartoons is, much like the later ones, decidedly anti-Conservative. If Sugden and Baldwin weren’t the brains behind the original Humphrey then they were certainly aware of it twenty years later and chose their pen name wisely as an homage.
Speaking of pen names, Humphrey Thwackum seems to have been a popular one. Its use would continue; even after Sugden’s death there were still cartoons being produced under this name into the 1880s, as well as an occasional letter to the newspaper. However, now the supposed author was "Humphrey Th'Wackham"!
I’m sorry to leave you with more questions than answers, but Local Studies would love to know if anyone else knows anything more about Sugden, Baldwin, and who any or all of the other Humphrey cartoonists actually were. Assuming that's even possible, of course. That’s the problem with achieving fame through a pen name – your pen name might outlive your real one.
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