Valediction 17: Mr Punch
Goodbye, Mr Punch: Brian Alderson is bidding farewell to old favourites as he donates his remarkable collection of children’s books to Seven Stories.
Round about 1860 occurred one of the most insightful occasions for students of Punch and Judy: an interview with one of the street performers of the famous tragical-comical puppet play. It was undertaken as one of the hundreds of such articles by Henry Mayhew that were published in the third volume of his riveting account of London Labour and the London Poor (pp.43-60). His unnamed contributor gives a somewhat repetitive account of his ‘perfession’ with verbatim details of what he knows of its history and of the life he leads with his partner as they lug their portable booth round the London streets. (He claims that at that time there were only sixteen Punchmen performing in England, eight in London and eight in the provinces.) He also touches on such features as Punch’s high-pitched mode of speaking, the ‘call’ (now known as the ‘swazzle’) names and describes the traditional dramatis personae of the play and gives examples of the customary dialogue.
At one point he gives among his obiter dicta an observation on the transience of the craft with ‘a new world always wanting a new thing. People are like babies always wanting a new toy’ – a remark that shows more prescience than he could have known. For what has occurred about a hundred and sixty years later is the emergence of a woke generation not all that different from the Evangelicals of his time. They have greeted a reformed Punch, politically correct and now abiding by the shibboleths of the day.
This new performance has been reprinted from Covent Garden where, appropriately, the first news of a performance is recorded by Samuel Pepys, who went to see one in May 1672, taking his wife along a week or two later. A ‘great resort of gallants’ were present and he found the performance ‘Very pretty, the best that ever I saw’ (which bespeaks other attendances elsewhere of which we know nothing).
The show probably bore more resemblance to the commedia del arte harlequinades (with a Punchinello figure) which formed the subject of the turn-ups which children enjoyed in the mid-eighteenth century, and it was also performed by marionettes rather than glove puppets. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that Punch and his wife Judy (originally Joan) arrived with accompanying accoutrements: the Proprietor with drum and pipe, supervising things from front-stage and taking whatever money was given, while the puppeteer below the stage board performed the play.
It would seem that the original success of the show came from an Italian puppeteer, Piccini (Mayhew’s interviewee calls him Porsini) and a full-scale account of what became, through him, a lastingly popular street show was given by Payne Collier in his Punch and Judy of 1828.
Collier is notable for providing the first details of the fifteen characters who feature in one or another performance of the play and he gives the text of a version of it. As a literary journalist he is inclined to lard his coverage with learned notes and his reputation has been coloured by his subsequent notoriety as a forger and Shakespearian fraudster. Only long-term comparisons can answer questions as to the authenticity of his initial work although his book was garnished with twenty-four hand-coloured etchings by George Cruikshank – front-of-stage views of the passing tragi-comedy.
As the long-term comparison passes through often rare copies of the play its first example occurs in the volume for children discussed here. George Speaight, the foremost Punch authority, sees it as the first and one of the best editions to give a credible sequence to the serial depredations of our hero. After an introductory exchange between Punch and the Proprietor we proceed through what may have been an established order of scenes but continues to be found with variants: throwing the Baby out of the window, killing Judy and the Beadle, meeting a Distinguished Foreigner, sometimes called a Russian Bear, a visitation from the Ghost which occasions that of the Doctor, comic business with Joey the Clown, a long argument with Mr Jones (often called Scaramouche) who gets the better of Punch over the stealing of his dog, Toby, a famous prison scene where Punch hangs the hangman, and, at the last, kills Satan (who sometimes, for moral purposes, is allowed to kill him).
The only concession to child readers is the provision of the anonymous limp verses, never found again, below each page of the pictorial stage settings – but these, though bolder, are no less fitting than Cruikshank’s.
Important though it may be in the canon, this Blackwood edition was never reprinted although an adapted version was published in 1919 as a cheap picture book[1]. Text and a monochrome copy of the illustrations are given a single page and a makeweight six pages are given over to limericks by Edward Lear and the rhyme:
It must be fun the crowds to chaff’
And whack your drum and make folks laugh.
I know what I intend to do
when once my schooling I am through.
I’ll buy a drum and pipes of Pan
And be a Punch and Judy man.
Brian Alderson is a long-time and much-valued contributor to Books for Keeps, founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times. His most recent book The 100 Best Children’s Books is published by Galileo Publishing, 978-1903385982, £14.99 hbk.
Biblio details
‘Papernose Woodensconce Esq, The Wonderful Drama of Punch and Judy and their Little Dog Toby, as performed to overflowing balconies at the corner of the street’. Corrected and revised from the original manuscript in the possession of the king of the Cannibal Islands by permission of his majesty’s librarian: with notes and references. With Illustrations by “The Owl” [Robert Barnabas Brough]. London: James Blackwood, Paternoster Row [1849]. 210x179mm. [54]pp.] ([1]blank; [2-3] h/c frontis and half-title in manuscript lettering; [4] blank; [5] tp.[6] imprint: London: Printed by Jack and Evans, 16A Great Windmill Street, Haymarket; [7-8] Preface; [9] Persons represented; [10-11] – [52-53] uniform layout: play text to verso, h/c stage scene, verses below to recto. Pictorial paper over boards cut flush, title to front, framed ads. to rear, rebacked with red cloth spine, new cream endpapers.
Ref. George Speaight, History of the English Puppet Theatre. 2nd ed. 1990
[1] Date and publisher from the BL copy. Mine lacks both but has lost the paper from its rear board. It was given at a Sunday School in 1925.
