me for 1843.

The particular incident by which this immortal poem was suggested was
one which had called forth a powerful leading-article in the "Times." It
was the "terrible fact" that a woman named Bidell, with a squalid,
half-starved infant at the breast, was "charged at the Lambeth
police-court with pawning her master's goods, for which she had to give
L2 security. Her husband had died by an accident, and had left her with
two children to support, and she obtained by her needle for the
maintenance of herself and family what her master called the 'good
living' of _seven shillings a week_."

_Punch_ was at once aglow with red-hot indignation, and in an article
entitled "Famine and Fashion!" proposed an advertisement such as this
for the firm that employed her--

"_Holland coats_ from two-and-three are shown
By Hunger's haggard fingers neatly sewn.
_Embroidered tunics_ for your infant made,--
The eyes are sightless now that worked the braid;
_Rich vests of velvet_ at this mart appear,
Each one bedimm'd by some poor widow's tear;
And _riding habits_ formed for maid or wife,
All cheap--aye, ladies, cheap as pauper-life.
For _mourning suits_ this is the fitting mart,
For every garment help'd to break a heart."

The subject touched Hood more powerfully perhaps than others, for his
nature was essentially grave and sympathetic. As he himself had said,
it was only for his livelihood that he was a lively Hood--although he
was always brimming over with comicalities; and he never felt more
deeply the dignity of his profession and his own force and weight than
when he was engaged on serious work. So Hood conjured up his "Song of
the Shirt," moved by the revelations of poor seamstresses who received,
as it appeared, five farthings a shirt, out of which sum they had to
find their own needles! Mark Lemon told Mr. Joseph Hatton that Hood had
"accompanied the poem with a few lines in which he expressed the fear
that it was hardly suitable for _Punch_, and leaving it between his
discretion and the waste-paper basket." It had, said Hood, already been
rejected by three papers, and he was sick of the sight of it. Mark Lemon
brought the poem up at the Table, where the majority of the Staff
protested against its inclusion in a comic paper. But Lemon was
determined; and, after all, was it not for a Christmas number that he
destined it--a number in which something serious, pathetic, with a note
of pity and love, was