Punch magazine is the reason a funny drawing is called a cartoon
In 1843, designs for murals in the new Houses of Parliament went on public display. They were cartoons in the old sense, full-size preparatory sketches on heavy card. Punch, a two-year-old satirical weekly, mockingly applied the word to its own political drawings, and the joke stuck so well that it changed the language.
Henry Mayhew and the wood engraver Ebenezer Landells launched Punch on 17 July 1841 with just £25, borrowing the anarchic puppet from Punch and Judy as mascot and a subtitle, The London Charivari, from a French satirical paper. A pun helped too: the co-editor was Mark Lemon, and punch is nothing without lemon. Readers were scarce at first, apart from an 1842 almanac that astonished its makers by selling 90,000 copies, and that December the struggling title was sold to the printers Bradbury and Evans, who also published Dickens and Thackeray.
Gentle wit and a lack of offensive material made it a fixture of British drawing rooms. The Times and the News of the World lifted snippets as column fillers, handing it free publicity and respectability. Readers ranged from Queen Victoria and Charlotte Brontë to Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Punch gave English the Crystal Palace and the curate's egg, from an 1895 George du Maurier cartoon, and The Diary of a Nobody first appeared in its pages as a serial. John Tenniel, later famous for illustrating Alice, was its chief cartoonist from 1864 to 1901.
Imitators sprang up across the world, from Melbourne to Lucknow's Urdu weekly Awadh Punch. Charles Wirgman's Japan Punch, begun in 1862, fed into elements of modern manga, and China Punch, founded in Hong Kong in 1867, was the first humour magazine in greater China.
Sales passed 100,000 around 1910 and peaked at up to 184,000 in 1947 and 1948 before a long slide that closed the magazine in 1992. Mohamed Al-Fayed revived it in 1996 with a boxing glove on the cover, but it lost an estimated £10 million or more and folded again in 2002. Its office table, carved with the initials of staff and guests including James Thurber and the future Charles III, went to the British Library in 2004. Mark Twain declined to carve his, joking that Thackeray's initials already contained his own.
Source: Punch (magazine)
