Punch Magazine in United Kingdom

In old France a charivari was, says the OED, a babel of clatter and noise raised in mockery.
So in 1841 Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew thought of adopting that name for their new
weekly magazine. Then a supporter reminded them that a satirical journal did indeed need
lemon – just like good punch. So the founders took for their name and masthead the anarchic
glove puppet Mr. Punch, of Punch and Judy fame. They called the magazine Punch, or the
London Charivari. Mark Lemon was the editor for the first thirty years.

The 1866 yearly volume of Punch landed among my recent Christmas presents. Glancing
through it I felt that there is nothing like a satirical magazine for giving the flavour of an age.
The people of mid-Victorian England seem to have felt just as self-important as we do today,
though they were perhaps more insular. Many of their concerns were like ours, particularly
when it came to parliamentary representation. If MPs were not cheating on their expenses
then, they were being dishonest in other ways. In one of his large political cartoons titled
Bribery and Corruption the 1866 Mr Punch has a top-hatted MP ‘on the terrace of Parliament
Palace’ engaging in conversation with a grimy Father Thames below in the water. ‘O you
horrid dirty old river!’ the MP says. Father Thames replies: ‘Don’t you talk Mr
Whatsyername! Which of us has the cleaner hands I wonder?’

Preparing for the passage of the second Reform Act the following year, the 1866 volume was
full of references to rotten boroughs. Losing patience alongside a drawing of ‘A bribery
bloater from Yarmouth’, Mr Punch slyly suggests that in order to make the best of a bad
bargain the sale and purchase of a vote should be treated as an ordinary commercial activity,
with the Chancellor of the Exchequer collecting the price from the highest bidder. Speaking
more seriously, he recommends as a cure the long clamoured-for secret ballot – as in later
years it turned out to be. My own adopted county of Devon features prominently here. The
first Reform Act of 1832 had disfranchised most of the rotten boroughs. A few remained,
such as the Devon towns of Dartmouth, Honiton and Totnes. The last is named half a dozen
times in the 1866 volume, sometimes with one s and sometimes two. The following year it
was duly despatched by the 1867 Act.

Banks are also criticised, just like today. In his ponderous way, Mr Punch said in 1866 that
because too many acceptances (of bills of exchange) had been issued of late ‘in consequence
the word “late” has been the fitting prefix to the mention of establishments formerly of
financial repute’. (One thinks of Northern Rock in 2007). Mr Punch, still ponderous, goes on:
‘But if we ask ourselves what is the position of the Bank of England we cannot think that the
financialists would be much reassured by the statement that it adjoins the Royal Exchange.’
A Duke of Edinburgh is mentioned in my 1866 volume and also a Duke of Cambridge, both
royal titles revived in our own time. Our own cherished Duke of Edinburgh would scarcely
relish the story of what happened to his predecessor when sojourning in the city of his
dukedom. The following appears under the heading REVERENCE FOR THE SEAT OF ROYALTY:

‘The Duke of Edinburgh found himself incommoded by the multitude of flunkeys who
followed him about and thronged him. To evade this nuisance, His Royal Highness,
having need to go shopping, took a hack-cab from the stand. As he got out of the
vehicle two well-dressed ladies asked the cabman “For a shilling, how long will you let
us sit just where he was?”’

Mr Punch, delicately marvelling at ‘the lack of pride, not to say self-respect,’ involved here,
thought the ladies supposed that this intrusion ‘communicated to them some of the honour
which, together with warmth, had been communicated to it by the surface which had rested on
its own’.

The Mr Punch of 1866 is very interested about what goes on in the street. Horses are constant,
being the sole means of motive power. Garrotting, a favoured method of street robbers, is
mentioned many times. So is black fog, caused by the ubiquitous use of coal for heating and
cooking. Each house has a coal cellar, indicated by the circular metal covers dotted down the
middle of every pavement. Sweeps feature prominently. Shoeblack boys fight for custom. In
one drawing an old gentleman struggles to retain his balance with a boy adhering tenaciously
to each foot.

Railways are of great interest in the 1866 volume. In Parliament Mr Lyster O’Beirne MP
asked, ‘very reasonably’, whether the Board of Trade would do nothing to obviate the danger
‘to which persons on horseback and carriages are exposed by the railway engines which now
run shrieking across thoroughfares’. According to Punch the Minister improbably replied that
private persons ‘had no right to complain of being smashed’. Mr Punch observed:
‘Juries will take notice of such answers and, we trust, continue to give Howling
Damages whenever an action is brought for the slaughter of such contemptible
creatures as private individuals. The Jury Box is our only protection.’

There is a neat reversal regarding branch lines. In the twenty-first century many people are
concerned to support preservation societies and reopen closed branches. The opposite was the
case in the mid-nineteenth century, when people objected to spoliation of the countryside by
railway contractors. Here Mr Punch breaks into verse.

We are monarchs of all we survey,
Our progress there’s none to dispute:
From the centre our lines, to the sea,
Branches new, all around, ever shoot.
O Solitude! Where are thy charms,
If we choose, that we cannot deface,
And destroy, with discordant alarms,
The peace of a beautiful place?

The fallen Railway King George Hudson, once a great employer of such despoilers, has a
spoof letter (genuine letters from readers are not published in Punch). In it he asks to be
whitewashed by Mr Punch, like some other railway pioneers. He adds:

‘Financing wasn’t understood in my time, as it is now. If you do what I want I can put
you up to a real good thing in Spanish lines’.

Church doings are of great interest. Mr Punch is opposed to what he calls ritualism, attacking
it at every turn and calling it Pernicious Nonsense. A large cartoon with this title shows John
Bull (the epitome of England) rebuking clerical dignitaries with the words: ‘I pay your
reverences to look after my Establishment, and if you neglect your duty I shall see to it
myself’. A robed thurifer swinging a smoking censer stands in the background.

The law also concerns Mr Punch in 1866, particularly when dealing with criminals. A modern
note is struck when he cites, on those who would use drunkenness as a defence, the Lord
Chancellor Lord Brougham (who invented a type of carriage, and said that education makes a
people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave):

‘One sees with astonishment and indignation, in cases before Magistrates in the
country, intoxication urged in extenuation of offences, whereas it is a gross
aggravation. No Magistrate is entitled to suffer one such word to be uttered before him
on the part of the accused. Any Magistrate is entitled to stop the party or his advocate
the moment he begins on this, and tell him that if he is intoxicated he must suffer a
punishment more severe.’

Mr Punch says: ‘Bravo, Henry Brougham! These words of yours should be inscribed in every
country justice-room and common sessions chamber.’