Percival Leigh

Artist Info

Percival LeighHaddington, Scotland, 1813 - 1889, London

Lc name authority rec. nr 94017192

LC Heading: Leigh, Percival, 1813-1889

Biography:

Leigh, Percival (1813–1889), satirist, son of Leonard Leigh of St Cross, Winchester, was born at Haddington, Scotland, on 3 November 1813. He was educated for the medical profession at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he became good friends with the illustrator John Leech, as well as Albert Smith and Gilbert À Beckett. But although he became LSA in 1834 and MRCS in 1835, he and Leech found their real calling in comic literature, and they banded together in 1840 to produce three books: The Comic Latin Grammar, The Comic English Grammar, and The Fiddle-Faddle Fashion Book. This last was an exceedingly popular jeu d'esprit, containing colour illustrations of some fifty men in the most ridiculous assortment of male and female attire. A fourth work, Portraits of Children of the Mobility, appeared in 1841, and was so popular that the pair were immediately recruited to Punch on its formation a few months later.

At Punch Leigh rubbed elbows—quite literally, at its dinners—with William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, and Thomas Hood, and he was the first to carve his initials into the Punch table. He published Jack the Giant Killer in 1843, and, a good amateur actor, was a member, with Dickens, Leech, and Douglas William Jerrold, of the company which performed Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour on 21 September 1845 at Miss Kelly's Theatre, Dean Street, Soho (later the Royalty), in which Leigh took the role of Oliver Cob. As a result of these plaudits he was named deputy editor of Punch under Mark Lemon, but was prevented from becoming Lemon's successor by Shirley Brooks.

Leigh's best work—though the only one not illustrated by Leech—appeared in 1849, Ye manners and customs of ye Englyshe: drawn from ye quick by Richard Doyle, to which be added some extracts from Mr. Pips hys Diary. Originally appearing serially in Punch, it owes much to Doyle's illustrations. But Leigh's application of ancient phraseology to modern affairs, such as a shareholders' meeting, made a decided hit. It is a clever, sarcastic chronicle of prevailing fashions and opinions, and its enlarged edition of 1876 was still in print in 1949. As with nearly all his works, the humour hinges on the schoolroom. Thus he was known jocularly among his friends as the Professor, and the best likeness of him is a caricature by Leech in their last book, Paul Prendergast, or, The Comic Schoolmaster (1859)—as an absent-minded professor, twirling his cane and pulling out his hair.

In 1850 Leigh lived at 10 Bedford Street, Bloomsbury, London, but before 1860 he had moved to Oak Cottage, 221 Hammersmith Road, Hammersmith, where he died on 24 October 1889. He was the last survivor of the early writers for Punch, though his weekly contributions had ceased to appear in the magazine for some fifteen years. His wife, Letitia, née Morrison, predeceased him.

W. A. J. Archbold, rev. Katharine Chubbuck

Sources W. P. Frith, John Leech: his life and work, 1 (1891) · R. G. G. Price, A history of Punch (1957), 33, 68, 100–07, 129, 136 · Still crazy after all these years: Punch at 150 (1991) · J. Forster, The life of Charles Dickens, new edn, ed. A. J. Hoppé, 1 (1966), 375–7 · G. Everitt, English caricaturists and graphic humourists of the nineteenth century (1886), 282 · The Athenaeum (2 Nov 1889), 600 · ‘Percival Leigh, 1813–89’, The new Cambridge bibliography of English literature [2nd edn], 3, ed. G. Watson (1969), 1390 · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1890)

Likenesses photograph, c.1880–1889 (with Sir Francis Burnard), repro. in Punch at 150 · J. Leech, caricature, repro. in P. Prendergast [P. Leigh], Paul Prendergast, or, The comic schoolmaster (1859)

Wealth at death £10,817 18s.: probate, 4 Jan 1890, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

W. A. J. Archbold, ‘Leigh, Percival (1813–1889)’, rev. Katharine Chubbuck, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/16388, accessed 20 Oct 2015]