ABSTRACT

Although Punch was the first publication to label its political drawings ‘cartoons,’ the paper did not invent the genre (Houfe, 21). It did, however, take the wild, often crude and semi-pornographic visual comic productions o f the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and helped to make them acceptable for middle-class tastes. Boasting of the quality of its political cartoons, one o f the paper’s writers, William Makepeace Thackeray, claimed: ‘we have washed, combed, clothed, and taught the rogue good manners.’1