The History of "punch

Before The New Yorker, before Private Eye, before every satirical voice that dared to lampoon power, there was Punch. M. H. Spielmann's definitive history traces the improbable birth of the magazine that invented modern English satire from its scrappy Victorian origins as a threepenny weekly struggling to find its voice. Through meticulous research and intimate knowledge of the publication's inner circle, Spielmann reconstructs the personalities who built Punch: Henry Mayhew, the obsessive idealist; Ebenezer Landells, the engraver who gambled his savings on a ridiculous puppet named Mr. Punch; Mark Lemon, the first editor whose name inspired the magazine's title through a bad pun about citrus. The book reveals how a publication dismissed by rivals as a fleeting novelty became the most influential voice in English humor, the institution that gave the world the word 'cartoon' and published the ancestors of every satirical drawing that followed. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where satire came from and why it matters.