Representing ‘A Century of Inventions’: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Victorian Punch *

This chapter deals on Altick’s approach, and analyses the periodical’s representations of and attitudes towards technology, broadly defined, between 1841 and 1861. This timescale allows new insights into how the periodical changed between two monumental events in the history of nineteenth-century British technology—the railway boom of the early 1840s and the laying of the first Atlantic telegraph cables in the late 1850s. Technology became the target of commentary in Punch for many reasons. Driven by the comic journalistic goals of producing texts and illustrations that were topical, amusing, and critical, contributors were particularly attracted to those technological events and issues with which readers would have been familiar and interested, and which were therefore ripe for satirical reflection and sober appraisal. An important indicator of the cultural significance of particular types of technology is the extent to which they inform metaphors or other aspects of non-technological discourses.