be untrue, as the name was not decided upon until a subsequent meeting.
Indeed, on the final prospectus, written with Mark Lemon's hand, as may
be seen on p. 20, the present title was only inserted as an
after-thought.

Then comes the version of Henry Mayhew's son, Mr. Athol Mayhew, who
claims everything for his father in a statement of some length, in some
respects authentic, but in many details entirely erroneous. He carries
back Mayhew's idea of a "London Charivari" to the year 1835; but, as
will be seen a little further on, Orrin Smith, Jerrold, Thackeray, and
several more of the wags of the day afterwards combined in a stillborn
effort to start a similar paper based on the same model. The writer
bases his case far too much on Hodder's "Memories," which, entertaining
though they are, do not universally command the trust and respect with
which Mr. Athol Mayhew regards them. "A more sanguine man than my
father," he says, "never breathed, and in his arrangement with Hodder
appears to have taken everything for granted, although the scheme had
not as yet been even breathed to Messrs. Landells and Last [the engraver
and printer]; for when the latter gentleman agreed to enter into the
speculation, Mayhew had removed to Clement's Inn." But the writer, who
would appear to have inherited the paternal characteristic of "taking
everything for granted," has not considered that Hodder declared that
his visit to Hemming's Row, by which occasion it is alleged that the new
_Punch_ had sprung to Mayhew's brain, was "_in the summer_." As _Punch_
appeared in the middle of July, and, according to the draft prospectus,
was first arranged to appear on June 10th (though this may possibly have
been a _lapsus calami_), it requires more than ordinary sanguineness to
accept the statement that not a word had been breathed to persons so
paramount in such a newspaper enterprise as the printer and
engraver--especially when the paper was to make its appearance in a few
days' time. And yet Mr. Mayhew adds that matters did not progress even
so rapidly as his authority, George Hodder, narrates.

Yet although it was not, as will appear, Henry Mayhew who was the actual
initiator of _Punch_, it was unquestionably he to whom the whole credit
belongs of having developed Landells' specific idea of a "Charivari,"
and of its conception in the form it took. Though not the absolute
author of its existence, he was certainly the author of its literary and
artis