Punch

May 16, 2004 4:07 PM

Punch CartoonsPunch set the standard for Victorian satirical cartooning. The Victorian Web hosts a number of cartoons arranged according to topic; see also Punch on the British Empire. Some students in Anthony Wohl's senior seminar at Vassar did a good job annotating a number of images. You can find late Victorian cartoons, as well as cartoonists' biographies, here. Of course, the current incarnation of Punch has a few things to say about its own history.
posted by thomas j wise (6 comments total)

Punch has a current incarnation?

Last I heard was that the phoney pharaoh had bought it, run it into the ground and had folded it?

On a side note are RBS ever going to call in the loans on the hideously overleveraged Harrods? Even a kid with GCSE biology knows that if the ins don't match the outs there's something seriously wrong...
posted by dmt at 4:35 PM on May 16, 2004

Is there anywhere online where you can download these in high-res, so they can be reprinted?
posted by josh at 4:49 PM on May 16, 2004

Great post, especially the annotated ones!
posted by loquax at 5:47 PM on May 16, 2004

It was conservative and unfunny. Irish servant jokes, etc. I ask you.

I remember Private Eye's cartoon about Muggeridge improving the mag and being sacked.

There are some good PE covers here.
posted by emf at 2:16 AM on May 17, 2004

Another site worth mentioning here is the Linley Sambourne House and Archive. Sambourne was Punch's chief political cartoonist, and his house in Kensington is now a museum, preserved exactly as he left it with all its late Victorian furnishings and fittings intact. It is often used for films, but remains one of the best-kept secrets among London's museums. Well worth visiting.

The site includes examples of some of Sambourne's cartoons, and some of the photographs on which they were based. He used his family and servants as models, as in this extraordinary photograph of his coachman posing as the Emperor Nero. He also dabbled in nude photography (using his maids as models, while his wife was on holiday); there was an exhibition of them a few years ago, including some rather disturbing quasi-fetishistic images. I didn't see the exhibition but did see the catalogue (an excellent piece of work, scholarly not voyeuristic); I'd include a link to it here, but sadly it seems to be out of print.

I once spent a night in the guest room of an Oxford college. It was freezing cold, I couldn't sleep, and there was nothing to read except nineteenth-century volumes of Punch lining the walls. emf: I agree with you, the cartoons are often profoundly unfunny. But occasionally the Irish servant was allowed to get the upper hand:

Mistress (angrily, to servant): Look here, Bridget, I can write my name in dust on the top of this piano!
Servant girl (thinking quickly): Sure, ma'am, and it's a grand thing to be so educated.
posted by verstegan at 3:31 AM on May 17, 2004

cock punch?

sorry, wrong *filter
posted by mr.marx at 5:06 PM on May 17, 2004