Science in mid-Victorian Punch

Richard Noakes

Endeavour 2002, 26:92-96

This article examines the scientific content of the most famous comic journal of the Victorian period: Punch. Concentrating on the first three decades of the periodical (1841–1871), I show that Punch usually engaged with science that was highly topical, of consequence to the lives of its bourgeois readers, and suitable for comic interpretation. But Punch's satire of scientific topics was highly complex. It often contained allusions to non-scientific topics, and its engagement with science ranged from the utterly comic to the sharply critical. Punch prompted readers to think as well as laugh about science, and probably shaped their scientific education more than we think.

Richard Noakes Is British Academy–Royal Society Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK. He has published articles on Victorian sciences and spiritualism, and is currently writing a book on the Victorian physical and psychical sciences.

Punch; Or, the London Charivari: the very name seems to evoke Victorian Britain, warts and all ¹ ( Fig. 1). Although it lasted long into the 20th century – it collapsed in 1992 and was revived four years later – we tend to associate Punch with the period in which it was born and reached its zenith. First published in 1841, it became one of the most successful and respected comic journals in 19th-century Britain. By the early 1860s it was far outselling rivals with a steady 40 000 copies each week, a circulation comparing well with the 55 000 of its more famous contemporary, the London Times ².

The Victorians too believed that Punch was pretty good at representing their world. Many would have agreed with one writer in the Athenaeum who opined in 1875 that 'The future historian of the nineteenth century will, we imagine, reckon the volumes of Punch as not the least useful among the materials of his work, not as much as a record of events but rather as testifying to the temper in which they were at any time viewed by the English middle class' ³. Have historians found Punch useful as a record of scientific 'events' and the ways in which its chief audience – the middle class – viewed them? Several recent works strongly suggest they have, and moreover, use Punch to raise important new insights into the ways in which the Victorian reading public engaged with science ^4–8 . Increasingly, historians are appreciating that Punch's rich textual and graphical tapestry contains much more scientific material than hitherto assumed. Although Punch generally saw itself as a comic journal of mainly political and social content (its longest-lasting regular column, for example, was 'Punch's Essence of Parliament'), analysis of the periodical's first 30 years suggests that over 10% of all articles contained a scientific reference of some kind or another.

In many ways, this isn't surprising. The first 30 years of Punch coincided with one of the most dramatic periods in 19th-century science, witnessing sensational theories concerning biological evolution, the principle of the correlation of physical forces, the massive extension of railway networks, the laying of trans-Atlantic telegraphs and the rise of government medical inspectors and women doctors. It also saw the development of plenty of 'alternative' scientific practices, including mesmerism, homeopathy and spiritualism. A sharp tracker of anything topical, Punch bore witness to these often news-breaking developments, and much more. Trawling through its first 60-odd volumes, we find cartoons mocking mesmerists and darwinian evolution, poems on public health and the Great Exhibition, parodies of scientific papers and advertisements for new pills, and awful puns on technical terms. But Punch did more than just reflect scientific news. Concentrating on its first 30 years, I show that it actively engaged with science, whether this meant championing technological ingenuity, carefully debating reports of new scientific discoveries or lambasting medical malpractices.

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