Punch in the Nineteenth Century

Gale Primary Sources Start at the source. ‘The Immortal Periodical’: Punch in the Nineteenth Century Patrick Leary Founder of the VICTORIA forum for Victorian Studies, author of The Punch Brotherhood Various source media, Punch Historical Archive 1841-1992 EMPOWER™ RESEARCH Introduction come and gone. The most successful of these, the In the long and lively history of publishing, there has penny weekly Figaro in London, had folded a couple of never been anything quite like Punch. With its eclectic years before, and nothing since had caught the public mix of jokes, puns, parodies, cartoons and social and fancy. Not that there was any shortage of available political commentary, the threepenny weekly quickly talent. Scores of young artists and writers haunted insinuated itself into the texture and rhythm of British Fleet Street, most of them living hand to mouth, middle-class life. Punch was not yet three years old contributing to this or that paper or pamphlet or when one writer hailed its 'permanent existence and theatre as the opportunity arose, meeting one another extensive success', and in 1858 a writer in the Atlantic in taverns between commissions, and keeping a lookout Monthly called it 'an institution and power of the age, no for paid work. [1] more to be overlooked among the forces of the nineteenth century than is the steam-engine or the magnetic telegraph'. Having acquired the Punch habit in Beginnings the 1840s, the British reading public clung to that habit It was in this bibulous and convivial, yet intensely for generations. So much a part of the cultural competitive atmosphere, in the dense warren of streets landscape had Punch become that forty years later adjoining the Strand, that Punch was born. Innovative John Ruskin called it, simply, 'the immortal periodical', engraver Ebenezer Landells, determined to succeed while American dramatist Brander Matthews declared, where Figaro in London had failed, enlisted the aid of 'Punch is not a mere comic weekly; it is a British printer Joseph Last as well as that of a man who would institution as solidly established as The London Times prove to be one of the most remarkable and versatile or the Bank of England or the Established Church or literary journalists who has ever lived: Henry Mayhew. the Crown itself. ...It has been accepted as an integral Mayhew, for his part, at once consulted his friend Mark and essential part of the British constitution'. To Lemon, who was then writing short pieces for the stage explore the back files of Punchis to listen in on a unique while presiding over the Shakespeare's Head tavern in kind of national conversation taking place week after Wych Street. With Lemon's help, a preliminary staff week for over 150 years, a conversation shaped equally was assembled that included writers Douglas Jerrold, by events and by the changing contingent of editors, Gilbert Abbot à Beckett, Stirling Coyne, W. H. Wills and writers, artists, engravers and proprietors whose tastes artist Archibald Henning. At a series of meetings in and abilities went to make up each weekly issue. Landell's house and in such taverns as the "Edinburgh Castle" in the Strand and the "Crown Inn" in Vinegar Yard, the name "Punch" was settled upon, a prospectus Yet in London in the summer of 1841, the prospects for was drawn up, and the financial details were worked a new comic magazine looked very uncertain. The idea out. Unable to find a publisher willing to serve as of a cheap comic paper built around wood-engravings, proprietor-the traditional model for starting a and modelled on popular Parisian papers, had been periodical-the original projectors decided to share the circulating all through the 1830s, and lots of them had costs and profits among them. Mayhew, Lemon and Coyne were to share the editorial responsibilities in New proprietors: Bradbury & Evans exchange for a one-third share of the enterprise; Bradbury & Evans would have seemed a natural choice Landells, with another third, was to engrave all the as permanent replacement for Joseph Last as printers, woodcuts; and Last, also a third-part proprietor, would and ultimately as co-proprietors as well. No other print the magazine at his premises in Crane Court. In printing business in London had so deliberately and effect, therefore, the magazine was to dispense with a successfully combined two elements that would be single proprietor and instead be a collective effort in necessary for a successful comic journal, elements that which all would share. had long been assumed to be incompatible: extensive woodblock illustration and high volume, high speed production. This was crucial. In addition to their long In the weeks before Punch made its debut the experience at printing illustrated serials such as projectors spent lavishly on advertising, including Paxton's Magazine of Botany, they had also been 100,000 copies of the prospectus and 6,000 handbills. associated with the Comic Annual. Perhaps most On July 17, 1841, the first issue appeared, and over the importantly, they had been the printers for Chapman following weeks Punch began to make its way toward a and Hall's innovative and highly successful experiments modest degree of public recognition, but at a high and with Charles Dickens's illustrated monthly serials, growing cost. The initial flurry of interest quickly beginning with the spectacular sales of Pickwick receded and, as month followed month, sales sagged. Papers in 1836-37 and continuing with Nicholas By September, with debts mounting, Joseph Last, the Nickleby (1838-39). By December of 1841 they had just printer, wanted out of the enterprise altogether. completed the demanding task of printing a weekly Landells acquired Last's share, giving him ownership of serial (Master Humphrey's Clock) identical in price and two-thirds of the magazine. That autumn, Mayhew and format to what Punch would require-a sixteen-page, his friend H. P. Grattan (at that time imprisoned for threepenny weekly, lavishly supplied with woodcuts- debt), plunged into the work of creating and in considerably greater quantities. The new a Punch Almanack. Coming out just in time for the printers, combined with the success of the Almanack, Christmas season, it proved a runaway success, selling made it possible to cut back on the pages of some 90,000 copies in one week. By the end of the year, advertisements to make room for more, and better, through an agreement guaranteeing the Punch printing woodcut illustrations. account to the firm in exchange for a loan of £150, the firm of William Bradbury and Frederick Evans became Punch's exclusive printers, a fact first But neither the Almanack's success nor Punch's announced in the January, 1842 number that began change in printers served to address two problems that Volume Two. had afflicted the magazine from the outset: a lack of capital and a lack of effective distribution. As the financial situation worsened-a situation signalled by the scarcity of expensive full-page cartoons in the second half of 1842-Landells sought, without success, to political partisanship, open obscenity, salacious persuade other contributors, such as artist H. G. Hine, scandal and gross personal attacks on well-known to purchase shares in the paper. The older Punch men individuals; such papers as Barnard Gregory's The retained a vivid memory from this period of Gilbert à Satirist, Charles Malloy Westmacott's The Age, and Beckett leaning out of the window of the editorial office Renton Nicholson's The Town were particularly and roaring to passersby, "We must have cash!" This notorious, and also associated with blackmail. In the same downward spiral had spelled the early demise of eyes of the early Victorians, Punch's great many periodicals of the time: a circulation too small to accomplishment was to offer wholesome comicalities, cover costs, leading to a debt burden that placed leavened with satirical commentary, that could safely speculative expansion of the print run, with the hope of be read and passed around within the family circle of achieving a sustaining level of circulation, further and even the most fastidious household. Indeed, in sharp further out of reach. At some point in the first months contrast to the scandal sheets, much of that humour of 1842, Lemon and Douglas Jerrold again sought out was itself drawn from a domestic setting, featuring Bradbury and Evans, this time to offer to sell them the wives, husbands, children and servants; even the editors' one-third share in Punch. Ebenezer Landells, political cartoons frequently represented public figures without whom Punch would never have begun, violently as children, at school or on the street or in the nursery. opposed any such transfer, and threatened legal action. One of the earliest reviews of the magazine, in The After a protracted series of negotiations that stretched Times, noted approvingly 'the total exclusion from its from April to December of that year, Landells sold the pages of all that is gross, low, or coarsely personal', remaining shares to the firm for £350, a figure and such approval was a constant refrain in representing little more than the magazine's debts. testimonials to the magazine over the years. Much of Landells himself, who originally retained the business this tasteful restraint would come to be attributed to of engraving all of Punch's woodcuts, was soon the careful oversight of Mark Lemon, who as co- squeezed out altogether, and Bradbury and Evans, with founder and co-editor (with Henry Mayhew) and then their extraordinary resources, assumed complete sole editor from 1845 until his death in 1870, was control. renowned for keeping a strict eye upon the contents. Hitting Its Stride Equally characteristic was the magazine's intensive Within two or three years, the magazine had arrived at pursuit of up-to-the-minute topicality.

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