Punch’s Pocket Book for 1855 – Introduction

Fecund. Frothy. Prosperous. With the Great Exhibition of 1851 kicking off one of the most prosperous decades of nineteenth-century Britain, the 1850s were seemingly full of new economic, social, and political improvements, some of which appear across the 1855 edition of Punch’s Pocket Book. London’s 1851 census shows a population of over 2,362,000, double that of forty years earlier; this is a society that Thomas Macaulay wrote in his bestselling History of England was ‘constantly moving forward with eager speed,’ yet ‘constantly looking backward with tender regret,’ themes that resonate across the totality of Punch’s Pocket Books.

Like other volumes, the 1855 Punch’s Pocket Book tends to skirt polemics, yet hints at conflicts across the world are present in its pages. These include the Falkland Islands (listed as an Australian colony despite their location off the South American coast), Lord Dalhousie as governor-general of India, and Britain’s entrance to the Crimean War in March 1854 as Ottoman ally against Russia. Although Part One lists military and navy agents, its illustration makes war seem a time of bonhomie with French cantinières serving refreshments to soldiers amid an encampment’s tents. Closer to home, the 1854 cholera outbreak centered in Broad Street had led to John Snow (1813-1858) tracing the contagion to a particular water pump; in January the Fleet Sewer had yet again been repaired, this giant undertaking referenced in the ‘Chronology of the Past Year,’ a tongue-in-cheek list of events ‘carefully compiled from public and private sources.’ From Parliament passing ‘unanimous resolutions that nothing shall be done until the 12th of August’ in January to a boxing match in August, this list interpolates the Brown family’s unnamed baby’s growth (vaccines, first steps, disappearance) and national events.

Other topical inclusions in this volume indicate London as center of the Pocket Book user’s world. The relocation of Crystal Palace—constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park—to Sydenham and reopening in June 1854 shows up in image and text alike, its courts displaying a range of historical architecture styles. Quotidian needs addressed in Part One include addresses for government offices, theaters, and banks; rates for everything from taxes to cab and coach fares also appear. In Part Two, Mrs. Frisbee notes how bonnet fashions have changed to expose women’s hair with shorter brims worn further back on the head, vegetarianism is roundly criticized in ‘Vegetable Mutton,’ and even the habit of talking about the weather mocked in ‘The Weather Made Interesting.’

Popular fiction also looked both forward and backward, as 1854 saw the serialization in Household Words of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (April to August 1854), then Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (September 1854 to January 1855), two major ‘Condition of England’ novels that illustrate the period’s social and economic stratification. Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854) a key text of the mid-Victorian Era—quickly summarized by its opening lines of ‘Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure’—further illustrates gender norms informing print materials in this period. This Pocket Book’s Part Two comic essay ‘Marriage Ceremonies of the Great Britons’ mocks the commodification of marriage and treatment of women, continuing the critical tone the Prize Baby Show frontispiece by John Leech (1817-1864) establishes. Although babies appear throughout the text, including the illustrated title page where Mr. Punch proudly holds up a baby Punch as pocket book, clad in a christening gown, they appear agents of critique more than typical celebrations of Victorian domesticity and middle-class morality. Both frontispiece image and text critique the relatively new practice of displaying babies like livestock for prizes and cash. Based on an October 1854 baby show in Springfield, Ohio that featured over 100 infants, garnering praise and criticism from both sides of the Atlantic, here the Pocket Book proves strangely prescient of their popularity and growth since American entertainer P. T. Barnum staged baby shows in the summer of 1855, creating a national craze with circuit of contests starting in New York City. These popular entertainments, as Susan J. Peason notes, fused ‘the sentiments of home to the growing, and densely intertwined, practices of commodification, consumption, and exhibition.’ Domestic but international, private but public, normal but uncommon: baby shows and Punch’s Pocket Books have perhaps more in common than not.

We do not have records of who exactly wrote what for Part Two of the Pocket Book, but do know its authors include Mark Lemon, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, William Makepeace Thackeray, Percival Leigh, Horace Mayhew, Sterling Coyne, and other Punch staff members. The ledgers for Punch’s Pocket Book for 1855 list 9,500 frontispieces and other materials in an entry dated 28 October 1854, just a few days after the Battle of Balaclava and ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade. John Tenniel (1820-1914) drew the header illustrations for Part One; Leech the full-page plates and initial letters for Part Two. By 30 October 9,250 cases (the leather covers) had been made, presumably to house the 9,300 copies that had already been bound, indicating ongoing demand for this annual pocket companion.