Punch (magazine)

Lore & Background

It was jointly edited by Mayhew and Mark Lemon, and subtitled The London Charivari in homage to the French satirical magazine Le Charivari. The name and masthead derived from the glove puppet Mr. Punch, and also referenced a joke about editor Lemon: 'punch is nothing without lemon'.

Reader's Guide

Punch was widely emulated throughout the British Empire, with imitators in Canada, Turkey, India, Japan, and China.

Did You Know?

• The Punch table, scarred with carved initials of staff and guests, is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Founding on a Shoestring

The two men, along with co-editor Mark Lemon, chose the name from the anarchic glove puppet of the traditional Punch and Judy street show, a character whose chaotic energy perfectly captured their satirical ambitions. The subtitle, The London Charivari, paid tribute to Charles Philipon's French humour publication Le Charivari. There was also a wry internal joke: a quip that "punch is nothing without lemon," a nod to Lemon himself. The early years were turbulent. Financial pressures mounted, and by December of that year the struggling title was sold to printers and publishers Bradbury and Evans, the same firm behind the works of Dickens and Thackeray.

Coining the Cartoon and Building a Brotherhood

Punch seized on the word to label its own political illustrations, and the magazine's popularity carried the new meaning into everyday usage. Helen Hoppner Coode, recognised as the publication's first woman contributor, added nineteen drawings to its archive. Later decades brought Harry Furniss, Linley Sambourne, Phil May, and into the twentieth century, H. M. Bateman, Bernard Hollowood, and Norman Thelwell.

A Household Name from Drawing Rooms to the Empire

By the mid-1840s, Punch had transformed from a struggling threepenny weekly into a fixture of British domestic life. Its sophisticated wit and deliberate avoidance of offensive material set it apart from the cruder satirical press of the era, making it a welcome presence in middle-class drawing rooms and, eventually, in the households of royalty. Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and a constellation of literary luminaries—Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson—were all among its readers. The Times and the Sunday paper News of the World regularly lifted short pieces for column filler, granting the magazine a degree of respectable visibility no other comic title enjoyed.

Peak, Decline, and a Long Farewell

Circulation tells a story of remarkable growth followed by a long, steady fade. After that post-war peak, however, the magazine entered an unbroken downward trajectory. Its material had long been collected into book form, and its legacy—embedded in the language, the visual vocabulary of political illustration, and the drawing-room culture of Victorian and Edwardian Britain—endured well beyond its last printed page.

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