Punch’s Pocket Book for 1845 – Introduction

On first encountering Punch’s Pocket Book for 1845, the modern reader may be forgiven for assuming that Britain and its empire were entering a new phase of international détente and domestic stability. Given Britain’s past successes against imperial France during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815, and its more recent victories in China during the First Opium War of 1839-42, this volume’s sustained focus on the nation’s rapidly expanding metropolis arguably speaks to an increasingly sedate confidence in Britain’s imperial ascendancy. In 1845, however, the global political landscape was as volatile as ever. As war continued to rage across Siam and Vietnam, fresh hostilities erupted in British India. And yet, the reader glimpses little in this annual publication concerning Britain’s growing influence in South-East Asia nor the East India Company’s battle to wrest control of the Punjab from its Sikh rulers – a territorial struggle that would result in the onset of the First Anglo-Sikh War in December 1845.

In general, Punch’s Pocket Book for 1845 manages to skirt political controversy and polemic. Beyond the standardised directory of government officials, agencies, and institutions that are presented in Part One’s administrative almanack, there is relatively little direct comment upon the politics of the day. Likewise, the miscellaneous narratives and lavishly-illustrated plates of Part Two rarely move beyond quotidian settings. This is repeatedly evidenced by Part Two’s index, which is inventively presented in mock-heroic couplets. Here, “Reflections upon Bills” interleave with “Thoughts and Maxims upon Public Dinners” and “Lines to a Schoolboy.” In a similarly parochial vein, narratives such as “Evenings in Ramsgate” and “The Oxford Reading Man and his Chum” unite with their accompanying illustrations to rehearse a well-worn, if hyperbolic, juxtaposition between English urban and rural life. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this type of humour is provided by the elaborate hand-coloured frontispiece entitled “Farming for Ladies.” Illustrated by John Leech (1817-1864), this etching serves as a visual counterpart to an eponymous narrative in Part Two of the volume. Both image and text ridicule the supposed faddishness of fashionable London ladies whilst simultaneously reinforcing the traditional gender divisions of agricultural labour. At the same time, contributions such as “The Stranger’s Guide to the Great Metropolis,” “The Mysteries of London,” and “Statistics of Great London’s Fire” explicitly situate the nation’s capital and its immediate environs at the centre of the publication’s geographical purview. This geo-political solipsism is somewhat curious given that legislation intending to position Britain’s publishing industry within the global marketplace – namely, “The International Copyright Act of 1844” – had come into force a few months prior to this volume’s publication. It is also in direct contrast with later volumes of the publication, such as that of 1875, in which world figures ranging from Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) to the Governor of Bosnia, İbrahim Derviş Paşa (1817-1896), are mercilessly ridiculed in both outrageous illustrations and outlandish narratives.

Still, on perusing the wood engravings contributed by the newly appointed Punch illustrator, Richard Doyle (1824-1883), any well-informed nineteenth-century reader might readily infer the publication’s stance on the major political crises of the day. Though widely interspersed and ostensibly unconnected to each other, the images that enliven Part One’s otherwise rigid display of civic facts and figures serve collectively to contest the political status quo. For example, Doyle’s wood-engravings on pages 10 and 35 jointly convey Punch’s concerns regarding the direction of governmental policy. On the former page, a small woodcut image presented under the rubric of “The Legislature” is subtle yet striking in its allusion to the government’s internal divisions. Here, the Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), and his party rival, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), bow stiffly to one another as they stare belligerently into each other’s eyes. Doyle further underlines the ideological conflict between the two political rivals via the discrete placement of the manuscript of Disraeli’s first novel, Coningsby, or The New Generation (1844) in the younger man’s trouser pocket. In its depiction of a neophyte politician determined to embrace a new English feudalism, this novel bemused many of Disraeli’s political peers, but it also became a lodestone for his idealistic ‘Young England’ movement.

Born into a Jewish émigré family, Disraeli would eventually lead the Conservative party as the British prime minister in 1868 and again from 1874-1880. In the early 1840s, however, he forged his reputation through acerbic attacks on Peel’s premiership. His critique largely focused upon the latter’s growing dismissal of longstanding Tory interests in favour of free trade principles and, in particular, a greater relaxation of Irish trade restrictions. In this period, Punch’s contributors generally opposed Disraeli’s protectionist agenda, particularly his support for the Corn Laws of 1815 – legislation that served to protect rural landowners but had a deleterious effect on food prices for the wider British populace. In the only explicitly political narrative of Part Two, entitled ‘Guy’s Modern Geography: Young England,” Disraeli is repeatedly described in pejorative terms via the use of blatantly anti-semitic tropes. Nevertheless, Doyle’s aforementioned woodcutting on page 35 of this volume reinforces some of Disraeli’s favourite talking points through its caricatures of both British and Irish politicians. Under the heading “Taxes,” Peel is perched on the left side of a gigantic Queen Victoria “Young Head” sovereign, thrusting his right hand forward to catch a coin dropped by a disgruntled country squire, while amassing money sacks marked ‘income tax’ behind his back. To the right, the Irish politician, Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), carries a money sack marked ’RINT’ and demands money from a stereotypically impoverished Irish peasant. The representation of O’Connell wearing a miniature crown reinforces British anxieties regarding Irish agitation for greater autonomy.

Championed by his supporters as “The Liberator,” O’Connell led Ireland’s Roman Catholic majority in the campaign for Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union via the establishment of the Catholic Association, an organisation into which supporters paid what became known as ’the Catholic rent" of a penny each month. Throughout this period, Punch publications repeatedly propagated the erroneous claim that it was O’Connell’s ’RINT’ and not British policy that was impoverishing the Irish tenant class. This pernicious ideological position was stubbornly maintained even in the wake of the Great Famine, a period of mass hunger in Ireland during the period 1845-1852. Further to this point, it is worth noting that Part One’s section entitled “The Population” on pages 24-26 provides an easily digestible summary of census information from across Britain and Ireland. Whilst this data signals a stable and growing population across all four nations, it is perhaps unsurprising that this section was not continued in this specific form in subsequent volumes published in 1846 and 1847. Despite the continued inclusion of English population figures in both volumes, neither provides any further updates regarding the radical decline of the Irish population during these initial years of famine. If this volume’s engagement with politics initially appears muted, such omissions and ellipsis gesture towards the myriad ways in which the almanack form may become politicised not only in terms of its content but also in terms of its structure.