ABSTRACT
The Victorian world was an ever-expanding empire with the Queen a motherly hub. Beyond her bounds, foreigners were even funnier, and Ally Sloper loved to abandon his battered topper and drainpipes to dress up in some hilarious national costume or other. His broken German precedes ‘Katzenjammer Kids’ conversation by a decade. The international gathering around jolly John Bull for the first issue of The World’s Comic (p. 107) is a splendid assembly of stereotypes. The funny Frenchman was also a popular butt, thanks to the Paris Exhibition (pp. 108–9), while the Russians provided Anarchists (p. no) and the Czar himself (p. in). Yankees were generally sharp con-men (p. 40).
