Punch (magazine)
Based on Wikipedia: Punch (magazine)
The Magazine That Taught the World to Laugh at Cartoons
Before 1843, the word "cartoon" meant something entirely different. It referred to a full-scale preliminary sketch that artists made on large sheets of cardboard—called cartone in Italian—before painting a mural or fresco. When the British government commissioned murals for the new Houses of Parliament and displayed these preparatory sketches for public viewing, a scrappy humor magazine saw an opportunity for mockery.
Punch magazine published its own "cartoons" in response—satirical drawings lampooning politicians and public figures. The joke caught on. Within a few years, the word had completely transformed in meaning, and we've been calling humorous illustrations "cartoons" ever since.
That single linguistic contribution would be legacy enough for most publications. But Punch did far more than coin a term. For over 150 years, this weekly magazine shaped British humor, launched artistic careers, and influenced publications across the globe from Tokyo to Toronto.
Born from Twenty-Five Pounds and a Puppet
The magazine began on July 17, 1841, with an investment of just £25—roughly equivalent to £2,871 today. Henry Mayhew, a journalist who would later become famous for his investigations into London's working poor, teamed up with Ebenezer Landells, a skilled wood engraver, to launch what they hoped would become Britain's answer to Le Charivari, a popular French satirical publication.
They needed a mascot, a symbol that would immediately communicate their anarchic spirit. They chose Mr. Punch.
If you've never encountered a Punch and Judy show, imagine a puppet performance featuring a hook-nosed, hunchbacked character who solves every problem through violence. Mr. Punch beats his wife, throws his baby out the window, fights policemen, and ultimately outwits the Devil himself. The shows were wildly popular street entertainment in Victorian Britain, performed from portable booths that puppeteers could set up anywhere a crowd might gather.
The character represented gleeful subversion of authority. He was crude, violent, and utterly unrepentant—the perfect figurehead for a publication that intended to mock the powerful.
The magazine's name also carried a second joke. Mark Lemon served as co-editor, and "punch is nothing without lemon" was a pun on the popular alcoholic drink made from spirits, citrus, sugar, and spices. Victorian humor could be groan-worthy.
The Rocky Road to Respectability
Success did not come immediately. Mayhew left the editorial team within a year, taking on the vague title of "suggestor in chief" before departing entirely in 1845. The magazine hemorrhaged money, lurching from crisis to crisis.
Then came a breakthrough. An 1842 almanac issue—a special edition packed with humorous predictions and illustrations—sold an astonishing 90,000 copies. The creators themselves were shocked. Clearly there was an appetite for this kind of content, even if the regular weekly issues struggled.
By December 1842, financial difficulties forced a sale to Bradbury and Evans, a printing and publishing firm. This turned out to be fortunate. Bradbury and Evans understood the new mass printing technologies transforming the industry, and they published two other authors you might have heard of: Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray.
The association with literary giants helped establish Punch's credentials. Within a few years, something remarkable happened: a publication that had started as gleefully lowbrow became a fixture in respectable drawing rooms across Britain.
How did a satirical rag featuring an anarchic puppet achieve respectability? Partly through careful editorial choices—the magazine avoided genuinely offensive material while maintaining sharp wit. But the real secret was free publicity. The Times and News of the World began using small pieces from Punch as column fillers, essentially advertising the magazine to their readers while implicitly endorsing its content. No other comic publication enjoyed this privilege.
The Brotherhood of Illustrators
The artists who worked for Punch in its early decades formed a tight-knit community that became known as "The Punch Brotherhood." John Leech, Richard Doyle, John Tenniel, and Charles Keene all produced illustrations that defined the magazine's visual style.
Tenniel deserves special attention. He joined Punch in 1850 and served as chief cartoonist from 1864 to 1901—a remarkable tenure spanning nearly four decades. But his most lasting fame came from outside the magazine. When Lewis Carroll needed an illustrator for a story about a girl who falls down a rabbit hole, he approached Tenniel. The illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass became some of the most recognizable images in literary history.
Richard Doyle created what became the magazine's enduring masthead design in 1849. The cover design had varied during the early years, but Doyle's intricate border filled with fantastical creatures and scenes became iconic. Helen Hoppner Coode contributed nineteen drawings to the magazine, earning recognition as Punch's first woman contributor—notable in an era when professional illustration was almost entirely male.
A Table Carved with History
Sometime around 1855, a long oval Victorian table arrived at Punch's offices. It became the centerpiece of staff meetings, the gathering place where editors and contributors would discuss upcoming issues, debate politics, and occasionally drink too much.
A tradition developed. Writers, artists, and editors who had worked for the magazine long enough earned the privilege of carving their initials into the wooden surface. Over the decades, the table accumulated scars from generations of contributors, each set of initials representing years of service to British satire.
The magazine also occasionally invited "strangers"—distinguished guests who were not regular contributors—to add their initials. Only six people ever received this honor. Two of them: James Thurber, the American humorist whose cartoons would later appear in The New Yorker, and Prince Charles, who would eventually become King Charles III.
Mark Twain was offered the invitation and declined. His reasoning was characteristically clever: William Makepeace Thackeray's initials were already carved into the table, and since those initials were W.M.T., Twain claimed they already included his own.
The table now resides in the British Library, which acquired much of the Punch archives in 2004.
Phrases We Still Use Today
Beyond "cartoon," Punch contributed several expressions to the English language that survive to this day.
"The Crystal Palace" was coined in Punch to describe the revolutionary iron-and-glass exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The building—essentially a massive greenhouse covering nineteen acres—had been designed by Joseph Paxton, who had previously built conservatories for aristocratic estates. The magazine's nickname stuck so firmly that most people today don't know it was originally satirical.
Then there's the "curate's egg." An 1895 cartoon by George du Maurier depicted a timid young curate—a junior clergyman—breakfasting with his bishop. The bishop remarks that the curate's egg appears to be bad. Rather than offend his superior, the curate replies that "parts of it are excellent." The phrase now describes anything that is partly good and partly bad, or more pointedly, something clearly bad that someone insists on defending with faint praise.
From Peak to Decline
By 1850, Punch was selling 40,000 copies weekly. That number rose above 100,000 by 1910. The magazine's peak came in the years immediately following World War II, when circulation reached between 175,000 and 184,000 copies.
The readership during its golden years included an extraordinary cross-section of Victorian and Edwardian culture. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning read it. So did Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Carlyle, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert. Across the Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow all followed the magazine. Being mentioned in Punch, or better yet being satirized by it, meant you had arrived.
Several British humor classics first appeared in serialized form within its pages. The Diary of a Nobody, a comedic masterpiece about the mundane life of a lower-middle-class clerk, ran in Punch before becoming a beloved book. So did 1066 and All That, a parody of English history that remains in print more than ninety years after publication.
But after the 1940s, something changed. Sales began a long, slow decline that nothing seemed able to reverse. The magazine that had once defined British humor increasingly seemed like a relic, its style too gentle for a world growing more cynical and irreverent. Private Eye, founded in 1961, offered sharper satire and angrier politics. Television provided competition for entertainment time. The culture had shifted.
Punch finally closed in 1992, ending 151 years of continuous publication.
The Attempted Resurrection
In 1996, an unlikely savior appeared. Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian-born businessman who owned Harrods department store, bought the rights to the Punch name and relaunched the magazine.
Al-Fayed had a specific target in mind. Private Eye had published numerous critical items about him over the years, and the resurrected Punch was intended partly as a spoiler—a way to compete with and undermine his critics.
The new version looked nothing like the original. Where the old Punch had featured Mr. Punch himself cavorting across its covers, the relaunched magazine showed a photograph of a boxing glove. The message was unsubtle: this Punch meant to deliver blows, not pratfalls.
It never worked. The magazine lost an estimated £16 million over six years of publication and never achieved profitability. By May 2002, with only 6,000 subscribers, Punch closed for the second and final time.
A Global Influence
Punch's impact extended far beyond Britain. Throughout the British Empire and beyond, imitators sprang up, many incorporating "Punch" directly into their names as a signal of their aspirations.
In India, the Lucknow-based satirical Urdu weekly Awadh Punch launched in 1877 and ran until 1936. It spawned dozens of other "Punch" periodicals across the subcontinent. Punch itself covered India extensively, and John Tenniel's cartoons of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion—what the British called the Indian Mutiny—actually drove a surge in the magazine's popularity back home. For many British readers, Punch cartoons were their primary window into colonial affairs.
Canada got its own version, Punch in Canada, starting in 1849. It was published by Thomas Blades de Walden, described intriguingly as "a dilapidated member of one of the great aristocratic families of England." The magazine apparently did well until 1850, when De Walden and his associate Charles Dawson Shanly abruptly fled to New York. The reasons for their hasty departure remain unclear.
In Australia, Melbourne Punch drew direct inspiration from the London original. The University of Pennsylvania's humor magazine, the Pennsylvania Punch Bowl, took its name from Punch as well.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Punch influenced the development of Japanese visual culture. Charles Wirgman, a British journalist living in Japan, published Japan Punch from 1862 to 1887. The publication introduced Western cartooning conventions to Japanese audiences, and scholars have traced connections between Wirgman's work and the eventual development of manga—the Japanese comic art form that now dominates global popular culture.
China Punch appeared in Hong Kong in 1867, becoming the first humor magazine in greater China. Shanghai followed in 1871 with Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari, bringing the satirical tradition to the treaty ports.
The Legacy of Laughter
What made Punch matter wasn't just that it was funny. Plenty of publications have been funny. What made it significant was how it shaped the tools and language of humor itself.
Before Punch, political commentary in Britain was often vicious and scatological, filled with crude attacks that respectable people wouldn't admit to reading. Punch proved that satire could be sharp without being vulgar, that mockery could exist alongside sophistication. It created a template for respectable irreverence that influenced publications from The New Yorker to Private Eye.
The magazine also elevated illustration as an art form. The cartoonists who worked for Punch were celebrities in their own right, and their work influenced everything from book illustration to advertising to the eventual development of comic strips and animated cartoons.
And of course, there's that word. Every time someone calls a New Yorker drawing a cartoon, or describes an animated film as a cartoon, or mentions editorial cartoons or political cartoons, they're using a meaning that Punch invented as a joke in 1843.
The magazine itself is gone. But its influence—on language, on art, on the very concept of satirical journalism—remains woven into the culture. Every publication that mocks the powerful owes something to Henry Mayhew, Ebenezer Landells, and that anarchic puppet whose name became synonymous with laughter.