Thomas Hood: 'Comic Annual' (1834). (original) (raw)

LONDON:
BRADBURY AN AND EVANS, PRINTERS, (LATE T. DAVISON)
WHITEFRIARS.

PREFACE.
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FOR the fifth time, like the annual Woodcock, I make my autumnal appearance; and, according to his habit, am to be found in the same haunt as the year before, frequenting leaves, and wood, and covers.

Since the last season I have taken many flights, far and near, and with all my little power of suction have plied my bill around the springs of the Humorous and the Comic, which are, in the words of Bewick, "oozing rills that are rarely frozen." In such plashy nooks the woodcock is said to plump himself up in a single night,�and the sportsman who beats these pages in pursuit of mirth, must judge whether I have employed my time in laughing and growing fat, according to the proverb. Should I be received with the same relish and welcome as that estimable bird of passage, I shall indeed consider myself as "flushed with success."

To descend from metaphor, and stoop, as Pope says, to truth, I feel a sincere Captain Ross-like pleasure in re-appearing before my friends; although I cannot expect quite so pointed and fervent a welcome as a gentleman whose absence has kept all his well-wishers sitting on magnetic pins and needles. It is likely, therefore, that the Lord Mayor will not ask me to feast with him; but I am given to understand that eleven copies of my volume will certainly be invited to Stationers'-Hall. This, to an author, is more than enough of civic distinction.

As usual, I have endeavoured to conciliate the utilitarians, by mingling a little instruction with amusement, after the manner of the Library of Entertaining Knowledge. Thus the Reformer of our Legal Institutions will meet with a few submissive hints; and so will the religious Formalist, on the exuberant exercise of the holy-stone on the upper deck; while an improvement is suggested in naval poetry; and a protest is entered against the British Leaf, even as King James Counter-blasted the Virginian. I would fain be of use to my countrymen; and only regret that I have not the power ascribed to me by a very respectable householder of the neighbourhood, who has called repeatedly when I have been at home, to inquire "when I should be out?" After reminding me that last year I had made game of the Zoological Farm, and satirized the Fasting, and taken off the Water-drinking,�"Why," said he, "can't you take off the Assessed Taxes?"

It will of course be objected as heretofore, by certain reviewers, that my pages swarm with puns; but having taken out a certificate to "shoot folly as it flies," I shall persist in using the double barrel as long as meanings will rise in coveys. As a Cambridge coachman, who had acquired the habit from the Collegians, once remarked to me, "I do not see why words should not now and then be put into double-harness as well as horses." The late Admiral Burney, of all the adventures in his voyages, used to look back with the utmost pleasure on the fact of his having planted the Paranomasia in the Society Islands, by making the first pun ever uttered in the Otaheitan language. The natives received the novelty with a shout of approbation, and patronised it so warmly, that, according to recent voyagers, they are now become as expert at double-tongueing as Nicholson or Drouet.

It is usual, in the preface of an Annual, for the Editor to offer his acknowledgments to his Contributors; but as I have nobody to thank but myself,�for, as Coriolanus says, "Alone I did it,"�the acknowledgment will be better made in private, after the fashion of the eccentric Doctor Monsey, who, when he had taken his own advice for his own indisposition, used to transfer the usual Physician's fee from his right hand pocket to the left. I must not omit, however, to express here how much I feel indebted to Miss Kelly for a copy of "Sally Simpkin's Lament," and still more so for the original of Sally herself, in the Entertainment at the Strand Theatre;�a personation of such admirable truth and nature, that even an incredulous public will be apt to take my Ballad Narratives for Facts, not Fictions.

With this introduction, I commend my fifth volume to its Buyers and Sellers; and looking forward to "fresh fields and pastures new," I throw up my literary heels, and exclaim with the Peri, in Lalla Rookh�