Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841-1851 (review)

Beginning as only one of many comic periodicals hastily cobbled together by penurious hacks over drinks in pubs, Punch quickly evolved into a central institution of Victorian print and visual culture, avidly seized upon each week by peers, politicians, and common readers alike. It is no wonder that the very first article in the inaugural issue of Victorian Studies in 1957 was devoted to Punch, a piece by Oscar Maurer exploring the magazine’s responses to the American Civil War. Given Punch’s undeniable importance, the wonder is rather that it has received so little sustained scholarly attention in the decades since. Bringing his now legendary erudition to the task of remedying this neglect, another contributor to that first issue of VS has produced the most important study of Punch to appear in over a century, since Marion Spielmann’s 1895 history of the magazine.

Indeed, it is difficult to think of anyone else who could have accomplished the kind of extended contextualization that Richard Altick gives us in this stout but animated volume. Even for most specialists in Victorian history and literature, the experience of reading all of the way through a mid-century volume of Punch remains largely an exercise in not quite getting the jokes. As Altick demonstrates, one of the keys to the comic weekly’s early success was its knowledgeable satiric commentary on the news and personalities of the moment, and the difficulty of deciphering the meanings behind that commentary are compounded by the extraordinary range of reference embodied in the work of the magazine’s artists and writers. The Punch staff ransacked classical mythology, current novels and poems, talked-about paintings, popular catch-phrases, advertising, folk customs, gossip, fashions, and the periodical’s own back issues for comic parallels to people and events in the news. Altick is at his best in showing the many ways in which Punch functioned as a distorting comic mirror of The Times, a paper whose writers were not above drawing from the satirical weekly in turn to enliven their own pages. The concern with exploring topical immediacy closely links this study with its magisterial predecessor, The Presence of the Present (1991). Both books turn the process of scholarly annotation inside out by taking the kinds of detailed identification and explanation usually relegated to endnotes and expertly foregrounding them in extended form as a coherent topical exegesis that, for all its thoroughness, is nevertheless permeated by the author’s charming sense of fun.

The value of this procedure as Altick applies it to the first ten years of Punch quickly becomes apparent. Introductory chapters tell the story of the birth and astonishing early success of the magazine, demonstrating just how pervasive that success became on both sides of the Atlantic. (Among the author’s delightful anecdotal discoveries is the revelation that Emily Dickinson was an early and appreciative audience for Punch’s high jinks.) The real meat of the volume, however, comes in the chapters that follow, which in their number and abundance of carefully nuanced detail resist easy summary. A fascinating discussion of the magazine’s unparalleled inventiveness in parody and pastiche is matched by an exploration of the visual puns whereby multiple levels of allusive topicality were folded into a vast array of art that was never merely decorative. Together these set the stage for a deeply informed survey of Punch’s engagement with the social and political issues of the 1840s, from Douglas Jerrold’s relentless radical critiques of hard-hearted Poor Law commissioners and game-preserving landowners to its often rough handling of such figures as Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Benjamin Disraeli, and its favorite butt, Henry Brougham. Along the way, Altick is illuminating on the subject of the magazine’s appeal to its readers’ coarser prejudices, particularly the nasty strain of anti-Semitism that would disfigure its pages for decades, as well as its resort to crude stereotypes of...