WELCOME HOME, HAT

 at!  The Hat has returned to its rightful place in Evanston after the Northwestern Wildcats managed to pry it from the heads of the Illini.  Last year, a miserable debacle, the Hat game to end all Hat games with an appropriately miserable bowl berth on the line, the Illini won.  Northwestern turned the ball over four consecutive times and Northwestern's Hat-Nemesis Tim Beck Man stood in Ryan Field cackling as his three-year reign of madness in Champaign finally culminated in him hoisting the Land of Lincoln trophy to a horrified purple throng.  "Look upon this Hat," he bellowed defiantly.  "This justifies my ludicrous three year anti-Northwestern campaign.  This is normal! This is normal!"

In the year since, things have changed.  Tim Beckman became Shit Canman.  Bill Cubit, toiling as interim, took over the Illinois program in perpetuity, the Cubit name guaranteed to ring across Illini football for two entire years.  Northwestern rode a spectacular defense, a running game led by Justin Jackson-TheBallCarrier, and the sane and rational decisions of referees to a 10-2 record, a national ranking, and a bowl game.

Clayton Thorson came out firing in the first half as the 'Cats scored three touchdowns.  It appeared as though the Wildcats had spent the entire season refusing to throw before unveiling the Trojan Pass in the crucial Hat Game.  In the second half, though, Pat Fitzgerald and Mick McCall turned to their innovative Run 'n Punt offense, relying on Jackson The Ball Carrier to Carry The Ball while the defense took over.  All-Big Ten linebacker Anthony Walker terrorized the Illini backfield and the Wildcat secondary kept the passing game in check.  They were helped out by Illinois receivers who dropped an almost unfathomable number of balls-- Illinois quarterback Wes Lunt had a much better day than the box score indicates.  No sequence better sums up the snake-bitten Illini than their effective drive to a fourth-and-one near the Northwestern goal line.  The Illini lined up to go for it, then false-started.  Down ten, Cubit decided to kick a chip-shot field goal which then shanked wide right.  This series of plays will be displayed in the Van Pelt Museum of Football Cruelty.

HAT IS GREAT. ALL HAIL HAT

Illinois fans seem disappointed with the Bill Cubit contract.  Cubit was certainly not one of the marquee names changing jobs during this Flight Aware season.  On the other hand, Cubit presents a few advantages to the University of Illinois:

1. Players seem to like him and he has weathered the storm of general administrative tumult.
2. Probably believes in hamstring injuries.

Illinois's interim athletic director seems less than excited about the hire.  Here is what Paul Kowalczyk has to say about Cubit:

"Obviously, it's not ideal but for now, I don't think it'll put a dagger in the heart of the program."

 
I am not an athletic director.  But I am fairly sure that is not a ringing endorsement.  And I am also sure that you should use the phrase "dagger in the heart" unless your profession involves antechambers.

It is disappointing to see Illinois fans disillusioned about their football program, even if the schools are sworn enemies forever destined to clash as foretold by Beckman's Clock.  There would be nothing more satisfying than seeing a Hat Game have actual consequences in the Big Ten West.  There would be nothing more exciting than seeing ESPN College Game Day come to a Northwestern/Illinois game not because it is an embarrassing one-endzone baseball stadium sideshow novelty act, but because the winner would be going to Indianapolis.

Both Northwestern and Illinois have had great seasons this decade, just never at the same time.  The Northwestern/Illinois rivalry is in that way like a seesaw, although most of the time it is more like a rotting plank of wood moldering in a dirt patch four feet from a rusted seesaw mechanism.  Yes the teams compete for recruits, for media coverage, and in a grimly farcical branding war futilely focused on the Chicago market that climaxed in Saturday's game at a well-nigh empty Solider Field.

But, in the larger Big Ten, both are traditionally moribund programs overshadowed by the conference's Football Brands that expect to effortlessly plod through them on their way to yet another Rose Bowl.  Despite the in-state rivalry, Northwestern and Illinois remain bound together in Big Ten also-ran solidarity.
 
HATCHAT SIDEBAR

Northwestern's stirring victory over the Illini not only gave them bragging rights in America's Greatest College Football Rivalry, but it also gave them America's Greatest Rivalry Trophy, the Land of Lincoln Hat.  But there is one thing about the Hat trophy that has bothered me and that is this: the Hat is permanently attached to the base and it cannot be worn.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at our locker room celebration after we reclaimed the Land of Lincoln Trophy. #B1GCats https://t.co/cSaz4SPUeK

— #B1GCats Football (@NUFBFamily) December 1, 2015

Look this Wildcat sadly attempt to mime wearing the Hat.  He cannot.  There is a base in its way.  This is madness.  The Hat should be removed from its base and worn triumphantly upon the victorious heads of the hat-winners, not reduced to a grotesque locker-room burlesque.

Abraham Lincoln did not travel through Illinois carrying his hat on a trophy base.  That would be ludicrous.  The Lincoln-Douglas debates would have never helped publicize Lincoln enough to take Democratic nomination in 1860 because no one would consider voting for a hat-carrying maniac. 

LINCOLN: That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of 
                     Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these 
                     two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.
DOUGLAS: Why do you carry around your hat on a base instead of wearing it on your head?
LINCOLN: At this time of strife and division, you wish to discuss my hat?
DOUGLAS: Your hat practices are discomfiting and peculiar.
ANGRY BYSTANDER:  Answer the question, Lincoln!
ANGRIER BYSTANDER: Go back to Kentucky, you hat-carrying scarecrow!

I urge you to write school administrators and your representatives about this travesty and to engage in pointless hashtag activism about this by tweeting #WEARABLEHAT at all involved parties.  I plan to publish a 3,000 page screed about this in a new screed format I have invented called the monomaniagraph. Together, we can unite and probably amuse ourselves for nearly 45 minutes.

BOWL POSITION: DANGER ZONE

By Monday, Northwestern will know its bowl fate.  The Playoff Committee awaits the results of Lucrative Conference Championship games.  The bowls begin their dance of selecting teams by trying to land the biggest Brand Teams allowed by their slotting.  The combination of bowl selection and playoff rankings have made this a week for the brandishing of advanced statistics, complex transitive property arguments, and the traditional claims that teams ain't played no one.  It's Recrimination Week.  Northwestern, for once, is in the middle of this because they are jockeying for a more prestigious bowl game and higher rankings.  This is exciting because it implies a small amount of relevance for Northwestern's football program and also because it is fun to complain about things on the internet and make snide remarks about body clocks.

Of course, bowl positioning does not really matter.  The entire hierarchy of bowl games after the playoffs is a meaningless system where older bowl games that have names that appended by ridiculous sponsors rank higher than games that are named completely by their ridiculous sponsors; thus, the Gator Bowl (now known as the TaxSlayer.com Bowl) is more prestigious than the GoDaddy Bowl, the Quick Lane Bowl or the arrestingly bellicose Armed Forces Bowl.
 
The Beef O'Brady's Bowl, played at the decrepit Tropicana Field, was such a perfect shitty 
bowl game name that it burned out like a glorious comet.  Then, it metamorphosed into the 
BitCoin Bowl, which was somehow even more ridiculous before settling into the 
disappointingly stolid St. Petersburg bowl.  I have pledged $45.00 in naming rights for the 
bowl to be called the Bringyourchampionstheyreourmeat.blogspot.com St. Petersburg Bowl. 
If you are a representative of the St. Petersburg Bowl, please contact me and let me know 
when to fly down a present the trophy.

The hierarchy of bowl games is, I suppose, a way to differentiate the bowl games that have multiplied across the nation.  This year, there are more so many bowl games that there are not enough teams that have reached the magical 6-6 threshold of Bowl Eligibility to play.  Therefore, 5-7 teams will receive invitations, in order of Brand Status.  This means that Illinois, despite dashing itself upon the rocks of Northwestern's defense for four quarters last Saturday can still go to a bowl (and I hope they are selected).  Nebraska, America's most prominent 5-7 team, will almost certainly receive one.  At this point, matchups and rankings and hierarchy are all that separate the bowls until the NCAA decides to thrust all of the non-playoff teams into a giant fishbowl and select bowl matchups by lot.

This is not a time to become stressed about Northwestern's ranking or bowl positioning.  The Wildcats have won ten games and they are ranked and I am still sort of dreading a flood of hail marys that will somehow take them all away.

NORTHWESTERN SEASON IN REVIEW

Northwestern has finished off a season of the impossible.  In the past two years, the Wildcats won ten games combined, and lost in mind-bogglingly improbable ways.  In two games, Northwestern fell victim to passes bouncing off a defenders hands at the last possible second.  In one game, they lost to a field goal team that successfully assembled itself like they were in aBuster Keaton movie.  They lost in overtime and they lost in the final seconds of regulation attempting to prevent overtime when the quarterback fell on his buttocks.  They literally lost to Tim Beckman. 

This season, the Wildcats went an astonishing 8-0 in games decided by a ten points or fewer and every one of those weird breaks fell their way.  This season, Northwestern managed to stop the tying conversion.  This season, the winning field goal went through the uprights.  This season, the referees took an apparent game-winning touchdown off the board because the whimsical hands of fate have decided that Northwestern should have that win fair and square by redefining what the terms fair and square mean.  This year, the Wildcats got the Hat.

Northwestern won with ugly football.  They unleashed a defense rivaled only by the 1995 team and seemed content to score only as many points were necessary, as if by winning by more than the bare minimum would trigger a loss through an innovative Price is Right scoring system.
 
Coming this spring to Big Ten Network, contestants bid on Rotel, extra-large men's pants, 
and luxury vacations to Indianapolis

Fitzgerald and McCall were content this year to let Justin Jackson ball carrier at people until they got within scoring range.  If not, they were happy to punt and let the defense back onto the field.  Every once in awhile, Thorson would find a receiver or, more excitingly, find a lane to gallop down the field with gangly strides through a baffled defense.  This offensive approach was effective, but also kept Northwestern's games within terrifying range of Northwestern events at all times.  Wildcat football is not often going to roll into a Big Ten stadium and demolish the opposition, and good seasons thrive on plays designed for wild swings of fortune.  The head football coach doubles as the endowed Dr. Ray Arnold Chair in Butt-Holding. 

It is possible to look at the Wildcats' numerous escapes this season and see their record as dependent on luck.  Advanced statistics appear to think the Wildcats have wildly overachieved.  But college football is itself an anarchic scrum relying on young people, the bounce of an oblong ball, BODY CLOCKS, weather conditions, referees deciding on increasingly arbitrary and obscure definitions of a catch, and a host of a zillion other things that wreak havoc on a twelve-game sample.  No teams, not even the championship-caliber, coach-firing, juggernaut nightmare teams win all their games without weird bounces and luck.  Northwestern not only played lockdown defense and had an effective running game, it also enjoyed the favor of the football chaos deities for once.  They won ten games, went 6-1 at home (and 1-0 at Chicago's Big Ten Neutral Stadium), and will finish the season ranked and in a prominent bowl game.  And our reward is to get to watch them one more time without the pressure of a bowl drought that originated in the Truman administration.  Most importantly, we have The Hat.

Week 13: The Sound Decisions of Learned Referees

Winter arrived last weekend in Madison.  The northern winds swept ice and snow across the Midwest and buffeted the stadium with freezing air and football misery.  It is as if Jim Delany, sitting comfortably in his LeaderLegend Big Ten Command Center flipped the switch from "football" to "Big Ten football" all the way up to "Ludicrously Big Ten football" and a torrent of sleet and cold and inability to pass the football like it was 1944 and we needed to send all our forward passes to the front and the Big Ten chaos referees all flooded into the stadium while the Big Ten Network beamed the debacle to dozens of American homes.  And, in the end, the Wildcats came away with a 13-7 victory, their ninth of season, and a chance to make it a 10-win Hat season. 

Both defenses played heroically.  Wisconsin's held even as the offense refused to hold onto the ball.  The Badgers turned the ball over five times; Wildcats continued to bedevil quarterback Joel Stave, who threw two picks and fumbled.  Tanner McEvoy, who threw an interception as a quarterback last year and now has become a receiver, fumbled as well.  Yet, time after time, the Badger defense held in their own end of the field as the Wildcats stalled out and missed field goals.  After an early pick led to a Northwestern touchdown, the coaches decided to run the Besieged Citadel offense.  Justin Jackson's 139 rushing yards accounted for about two-thirds of their entire output.
 
The Wildcats' play calling was so conservative that they only ran packages called "The 
Bourbon Restoration"

But the entire game was overshadowed by referee decisions. 

CALL ONE: THE RETURNER'S PREVARICATION


With the third quarter winding down, Northwestern had satisfactorily run into the Wisconsin enough times to get in punting position.  Badger receiver Alex Erickson caught the punt, shrugged off two Northwestern tackles, and weaved his way into the endzone to put Wisconsin up as Camp Randall erupted.  OR DID HE?  As the punt bounced its way towards him, Erickson signaled for his teammates to clear out.  As the referees later explained, Erickson's attempt to move the ball was an act of deception, of grave duplicity where he would signal a fair catch-- when the fair catch becomes not fair at all.  There is some precedent here.  Two weeks before, a Penn State returner had clearly made a fair catch signal then advanced the ball in an act of fair-catch signal derring-do that the officials ignored.  An apoplectic Fitzgerald charged onto the field,  his head so red that he resembled a human matchstick.  This time, the ball was handed back to an incredulous offense with six points removed.  The Badgers could do nothing and punted.

As a Northwestern fan, I applaud the officials for their enforcement of clear, well-known rules against that rogue Alex Erickson.  If Erickson wanted to make sure he got credit for his touchdown, he should have gone to the Memorial Library, requested a book from off-site storage entitled "Approved Football Gestures," and studied up on it instead of deceiving the Wildcats and preventing them from ineffectively attempting to tackle him.  I will quote here from the NCAA rule book:

VERDICT: THEY GOT IT RIGHT

CALL TWO: THE POSTMODERN CATCH


With less than a minute remaining, the maligned Stave drove Wisconsin down the field.  Tight End Troy Fumagalli appeared to score the winning touchdown.  Instead, his knee was ruled down at the one subatomic molecule line.  On the next play, Stave appeared to have hit Jazz Peavy for the winning touchdown.  Peavy caught the ball, ran several steps, and then bobbled the ball as he fell out of the endzone.  After a lengthy review, the referees determined that every Wisconsin football player has an incredible name.  Then they lit up a few Gauloises cigarettes, consulted their Derrida, determined that it is impossible to determine what a "catch" is anyway, and ripped away the winning score.  On the next play, Stave was sacked and knocked out of the game.  Backup quarterback Bart Houston entered the field through swinging saloon doors and tossed an incompletion aimed at McEvoy. 

While Peavy appeared to snag the ball and possess it for several steps, the rules are clear.  Peavy may have caught the ball, stopped, filled in the proper catch paperwork (the Transfer of Football from Quarterback to Receiver is available as a PDF on the NCAA website), but failed to get it properly notarized before falling out of bounds.  This unfortunate oversight on the part of the Wisconsin coaching staff cost them dearly, but is clearly stated in the rules.

VERDICT: NORTHWESTERN WINS YOW YOW YOW YOW YOW YOW

The sloppy pace of the game and the numerous sound and rational refeeeing decisions left a small but rowdy group of Badger fans with no recourse but to pelt their own cheerleaders, officials, and Northwestern players with snowballs.  It was a difficult loss on senior day, particularly for Stave, who thought he had rallied his team to victory twice.  Northwestern had numerous opportunities to extend the lead to the point where the referees would have no part in it, but the Wisconsin defense and the Wildcats' ultra-conservative play calling kept it close.  Northwestern fans in the stands had no idea how they won.  Pat Fitzgerald was delightedly perplexed.  And the Wildcats canceled their bus service back to Evanston so they could ride back in rum-running getaway cars.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

The Hat Game is upon us!  This blog has already covered hat-lore in Thirty Days: Hat November, An Oral History of the Northwestern-Illinois Game at length.  Last year, the Hat Game reached its apotheosis as it became a bowl eligibility game.  With the Beck Man at the height of his powers and Northwestern desperate to salvage a miserable season, it is hard to imagine a more perfect Hat Game scenario than as the Golden Ticket to what turned out to be the Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl against a superior Conference USA team.

This year, the teams have gone in opposite directions.  Northwestern has powered its way to a 9-2 record.  The Illini are reeling.  They fired Beck Man eight days before the season and released a 1,200-page report that depicts him as Will Ferrell's impression of George W. Bush.  After making fun of Beckman's absurd anti-Northwestern crusade for the past three years, many of his actual, real life behaviors turned out to be something like 15 percent less insane than this nonsense blog that claimed that he had an anti-Northwestern command center and crafting shed where he built shoddy replica Willies to set on fire and assault first-year players during Illini training camp.
 
There's no evidence that this is Beckman's car, but the man has crossed into the Beck Man 
Valley, where no piece of ludicrous anti-Northwestern activity can be ruled out unless 
specifically mentioned by a 1,200-page report.

The University of Illinois is also in turmoil.  The university sports an Interim Chancellor, an Interim Athletic Director, and an Interim Football Coach; the game will be played at Soldier Field, making this an Illini Interim Home Game.  Bill Cubit is playing for more than just a Hat.  He hopes a win and a bowl game will keep him in Champaign-Urbana for a long time.  It is hard to root against the Illini this season as the team has fought through the disorder, and Cubit's Northwestern-related pronouncements remain within the bounds of normal football person behavior.

What happens to the Illinois-Northwestern rivalry now?  I've noted earlier that the intensity of the Hat Game developed as a rivalry not between the two schools but between Northwestern and Tim Beckman himself.  Without the Beck Man and his avant-garde dada interpretation of football rivalry, can the Greatest Rivalry in College Football persevere?  The Illini, like Northwestern, are a historically moribund team often left for dead by the Big Ten Football Brands, all of whom are insufferable.  Nevertheless, it is important to soldier on and remember that, no matter how well the Illini have coped through a tumultuous season, they have The Hat.  That is no way to live.
 
After last year's debacle, Northwestern has hired its Assistant Dean of 
Procuring Rivalry Trophies By Any Means Necessary

So, it is with a heavy heart and with all respect to our friends at That School South of What Beckman Called The School Up North, I say: 

Give us that hat, Cube Man.
Give us that hat back.
Want that Hat.
Hat Hat Hat

Hat.

Old Hat

Well, they got the hat.

Northwestern's football season was plagued by misfortune and we spent a horrifying winter without the relief of a soothing, crappy bowl game.  But (and you know this because it happened apparently several months ago), the Wildcats somehow managed to outfox Beck Man, our Great Nemesis and retain possession of the most dapper football-related trophy in all of nineteenth-century fashion.  Equally importantly, I am pretty sure I ended up on some sort of list after sending a barrage of demented hat-tweets directly to whoever runs Tim Beckman's twitter feed:

@coachbeckman IT WILL TAKE YOU FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS TO BRING FORTH A HAT FROM EVANSTON
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 29, 2013

@coachbeckman Instead of referring to NU as "that school up north" please refer to it as Hat Town, USA
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 29, 2013

@coachbeckman hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat ha
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) December 1, 2013

Though I received no official response to these sophisticated and elegant tweets to the Illini Athletic Department, I would like to think that Beckman spent the evening prank calling everyone in Illinois named George McLellan and then ordering an absurd amount of hats off an internet haberdashery to hoard in his home's hat annex.

Rumors swirled in the treacherous college football offseason that Beckman might get fired.  Instead, the Illini will bring him and his absurd anti-Northwestern crusade back for another year because, according to highly-placed Illini sources, "someone playing up a football rivalry with Northwestern is the only thing we could think of that is funnier than Ron Zook."  I have no idea what Beckman has planned for next year.  For a small fee, however, I am officially making myself available to the University of Illinois to be their first Butkus Chair, Department of Northwestern Antagonism.  Together, we will rent orange blimps to constantly hover over Evanston, dropping anti-Fitzgerald propaganda; we will deploy larger and more aggressive tarps at Memorial Stadium; we will petition to ban Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and The Color Purple from all University of Illinois-affiliated libraries; we will put up billboards that say "Illinois's Big Ten Team and In Case You Noticed, That Includes the Entire Chicagoland Metropolitan Area, Checkmate Motherfuckers."

Anti-Northwestern Propaganda Leaflet

Hat or no hat, Northwestern football is past a disappointing season, and fans can look towards next year.  Venric Mark will return, along with several key players on defense.  Kain Colter, however, will be moving on, but not before attempting to organize a union of football players.  Colter and his supporters argue that football players are employees that should be allowed to collectively bargain with universities and challenge restrictions on transfers and loss of scholarships due to injury.  The Northwestern administration argues that the players remain in the nebulous "student athlete" category who play in exchange for a free education unrelated to the millions generated by television deals, merchandise sales, and other piles of money generated by college athletics.  After months of sophisticated legal analysis, the only way to resolve this is a strike by the nation's football players forcing university administrators to don helmets instead of canceling thousands of lucrative home games.  College football analysts will hastily reorganize their preseason rankings based on whether you can run the wishbone effectively in full academic regalia, which dean gets to be quarterback, and which university has the meanest, most bone-crunching vice provost.

NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL: EQUALLY BENIGHTED

What say you, Chris Collins?  Last year, Northwestern fired long-time basketball head coach Bill Carmody.  Carmody led the 'Cats to several NIT berths, but could never quite make it to the promised tournament.  I prefer to think that the methodical Princeton offense secretly irritated the brass, with high-ranking Northwestern administrators throwing things at their television every time they saw a backdoor layup developing or an opposing player working his way through the 1-3-1 zone to brutally dunk on a hapless defender.

Chris Collins was brought in to try to mold the Wildcats into a tournament team.  He brings youthful enthusiasm, a commitment to recruiting the Chicago area, and an association with the universally-loved Duke basketball program.

Chris Collins and Mike Krzyzewski are temporarily overwhelmed 
by visiting fans' awe and respect for Duke basketball, America's 
team

The transition to Chris Collins basketball has been bumpy.  The 'Cats are dead last in the Big Ten.  They will likely not play in a post-season tournament unless they somehow manage to win the Big Ten Tournament or every single other Big Ten team loses its eligibility because all of their players were replaced with doppelganger ringers that play professional basketball in the off-season in the secret European country that is ruled by Victor von Doom.

Despite these setbacks, there have been some positive things to take away from the season.  We got a full season of Drew Crawford, who was injured most of last year.  JerShon Cobb also returned to the team before succumbing to a broken foot.  There was a brief period of time when Northwestern turned into a defensive juggernaut and somehow beat Wisconsin at the Kohl Center for the first time and a fairly bad Indiana team on the road, and Big Ten teams occasionally had to cope with becoming Tre Demps victims.  Then they lost seven in a row, including one game where they scored 32 total points over 40 minutes of basketball.

Collins leads 'Cat Basketball into next season with some of his recruits joining the fold.  Big man Alex Olah showed some flashes this season, and Sanjay Lumpkin returns to play some defense and provide a really fun name to yell at people getting dunked upon.  No one expects Northwestern to crash the Dance any time soon, but that's part of being a Northwestern fan; anyone who is not prepared to die without seeing Northwestern lose the first match of an NCAA tournament, cheering the Cubs in the World Series, or proclaiming to a mortal enemy that you and me are not so different is setting him or herself up of a lifetime of cruel disappointments.

THE TOWN

The early Victorian scandalous press was a nest of innuendo, bawdy suggestion, extortion, and feuds.  In other words, it was the best possible use of presses ever devised by human beings.  Donald J. Gray's "Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism: Renton Nicholson's The Town (1837-1842)" is available in the Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff-edited collection of scholarly articles The Victorian Press: Samplings and Soundings, and it's a pretty good way to spend a half-hour.  Gray's study of The Town, a relatively cheap periodical that traded on scandal and innuendo, offers a number of trenchant insights into the early Victorian press, the transmission of ideas about social class amongst its working and lower-middle class readers, and how Victorian scandal challenges and reinforces scholarly understanding of Victorian mores in the 1830s and 40s.  Instead, however, BYCTOM will pillage this wonderful article for bawdy anecdotes and strip them of context and analysis for cheap laughs because this is a dumb internet blog about a football team.

Gray discusses The Town, as well as other scandalous periodicals including The Age, John Bull, and The Satirist.  John Bull initially targeted Queen Caroline, an enemy of her estranged husband, George IV.  George, a bloated, pickled, raffish king was repeatedly thwarted by his father's recoveries from mental illness and stubborn refusal to die.  He hated Caroline and attempted to divorce her using legislation based on allegations of infidelity (though George himself had been secretly and illegally married to a Catholic woman, Maria Fitzherbert).  The bill did not pass and the marriage remained a fraught battlefield.  As Gray relates, John Bull fanned the flames of her alleged affair, describing her as "mixed up with a disgraceful and criminal affection for a menial servant."  After the Queen's death in 1821, John Bull transitioned into a milder, less scandal-driven publication to my personal dismay.

 
George IV had the unfortunate luck to live at the same time as British cartoonist 
George Cruikshank, who delighted in drawing the despised, spherical monarch. 
Here, Cruikshank demonstrates how George successfully fended off radical 
petitioners  by becoming more buttocks than man

The Age, The Satirist, and The Town were all reliable factories of spectacular Victorian vitriol.  The Age, for example, dismissed the renowned essayist William Hazlitt as "Bill Pimple," "an old weather-beaten, pimple-snouted,  gin-smelling man, like a Pimlico tailor, with ink-dyed hands, a corrugated forehead, and a spirituous nose."  Yet, this gossip was not only directed at literary lions or axe-grinding aristocrats. The columns were filled with gossip about less luminous figures.  Those who wished to avoid a public humiliation about unthinkable indiscretions such as young women asking a man to dance could scrub the record for a modest fee.  Gray describes this kind of blackmail as an important revenue stream for these publications.

Gray's article, however, focuses mainly on The Town and its founder, Renton Nicholson.  Nicholson, a self-styled baron (invariably the best kind of baron), was a colorful figure who gained fame in the 1840s for holding mock trials satirizing infamous divorce cases.  Warrick Wroth, the author of a 1907 book called Cremorne and the Later London Gardens, described Nicholson as "a man who knew a thing or two" who had acquired a "remarkable knowledge of the 'flash life' of London in all its grades."

 
"After a minor experience of gambling-houses and doubtful premises of various 
kinds, he became (in 1841) proprietor of the Garrick’s Head in Bow Street, and here, 
in a room holding about 300 people, and fitted up like a law-court, he presided—as 
Lord Chief Baron Nicholson—over the judge and jury trials that were so attractive to 
the Londoner of the forties and fifties.  The causes that came before this tribunal 
 were chiefly matrimonial—the crim. con. cases of the time—and were such that 
their obscenity and heartlessness (mitigated, it is true, by flashes of wit) often made 
the most hardened sinner shudder."  Quotation and illustration from Warrick Wroth,  
Cremorne and the Later London Gardens

The Town was a monument to the seedy underbelly of the Victorian press.  It allowed Nicholson to attack his enemies.  In the late 1830s, he feuded with Barnard Gregory, the editor of The Age, whom he described as "a common extortioner, gaming-house keeper, and brothel spongee."  It contained bawdiness.  As Gray relates, "Often the Town was simply coarse in its unrelenting play on words like 'work,' 'thing,' 'getting up the linen,' 'working under the butler,' and [Prince] Albert's German sausage again (and again)."  More importantly, the Town, which avoided the official stamp duties and sold for a fraction of the cost of its rival publications, served as an instruction manual for its working and lower-middle-class readers with raffish aspirations.  Gray describes Nicholson's Town as "something of an enormous guide through a loose and well-populated network of places to drink, eat, smoke, sing, gamble, flirt with pretty women, and meet women of the town..."

 Alas, this golden age of scandalous journalism eventually was ground under the heel of Victorian moralism.  By the 1850s, the Town and its ilk became unfashionable, with proprietors open to libel suits and obscenity laws.  This had to be greatly disappointing to right-thinking people who needed clumsy double-entendres, fist-shaking vitriol, insinuations of social gaffes that are baffling in the twenty-first century, and descriptions of badger-baiting accidents or pheasant hunting chicanery.  According to Gray, imitators did spring up with incredible names like Sam Sly-- or, The Town; Paul Pry; Fast Life; Cheap John; and Peeping Tom.  I'm not entirely sure that Fast Life, Cheap John, and Peeping Tom are not currently the names of a Morning Zoo radio crew on Z108.5 GUYS, AM I RIGHT? 

Perhaps, though, there is nothing more useful I can do than to leave you with the opening paragraph of Renton Nicholson's autobiography, which is how I should start all BYCTOM posts:

Exquisite reader, I have a right to believe you perfection.  Let me shake hands with you at starting, for we are bound to travel together in sunlight and in shade, in lively day and dismal night-time; through narrow, devious passages and the mansions of wealth; with Lazarus and with Dives; o'er flowery meads and banks of wild roses; through cities, towns, and hamlets, where humanity dwells 'mid innocence and corruption, where base metal contrasts with unalloyed gold.

SPRING FORWARD

Exquisite reader, I have the right to believe you have wasted time and are now considerably misinformed about scandalous publications and Northwestern men's revenue sports.  Let us make fist-claws with you starting, for we are bound to travel in sunlight and in shade, in lively wins and dismal losses, through Wildcat alleys and Welsh-Ryan arenas; with Fitzes and with Collinses; o'er Victory Rights and wild option pitches, through Pizza cities, pizza towns, and pizza hamlets, where humanity sits 'mid legends and leaders, where base helmets contrast with unalloyed hat.