References
The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, 8 Oct 1864:
“MARK LEMON’S JEST BOOK.
A volume of this sort deserves support on much the same ground as Chelsea or Greenwich Hospital. When a joke has served its country meritoriously for a long time, it should not be allowed to go hobbling about society subsisting on charitable laughter. As a matter of public decency, it is right that there should be some honorable retreat for veteran jests, and the only possible on is a book which will keep them from the streets, lodge them becomingly, and, while it effectually saves them from being ever employed again on active service, preserve them as examples to excite a healthy emulation in the rising generation. Talking them out of circulation in this wholesale way is, it is true, rather hard upon those persons whose colloquial status depends on what is called ‘a fund of anecdote.’ When a joke or story has not appeared very conspicuously in print, it may be made use of with some degree of decency. But the most hardened retailer will scarcely run the risk of being referred to the page at which the authorised version of his mot is to be found. To make a collection, therefore, like Mr. Mark Lemon’s is to do an incalculable injury to many amiable gentlemen who are much esteemed in some circles for their powers of dinner-table-talk. It is actually taking the soup out of their mouths. We must not, however, allow such an objection to weigh with us, even though the sufferers should, like the American ladies, take to using their own manufactures.
Injustice, too, must necessarily be done to many very excellent old jokes. It would require a synod of editors to provide for all that deserve to be laid up in ordinary. Every one, Mr. Mark Lemon says, ‘will miss some pet jest,’ and of course the missing jest will be considered by each far better than anything in the volume – just as the old soldier of the parish is always the bravest and most battered and most ill-used man in the country, in the eyes of his co-parishioners. But we do not think the charge of being ‘miserably incomplete,’ which the compiler seems to anticipate, can be fairly brought against the present collection. Mr. Mark Lemon had, to be sure, special advantages for a task of this sort, but it is only fair to say that he has employed them so as to produce the fullest and best jest-book that has yet appeared.
If we venture to find fault with him at all, it is rather on the score of things he has done than of things he has left undone. For instance, there was no occasion whatever for inserting such defunct facetiae as the schoolboy rhyme about Dido dumb, or the story of the organist and the bellows-blower, or one or two others that we might mention. It is all very well to give an asylum to old jokes, but it is quite another thing to open a dead-house.”
