The role of visual appearance in Punch’s early Victorian satires on religion

Abstract

Satires on various aspects of contemporary religion are frequently found in early Victorian editions of Punch. The more strident forms of Protestant evangelicalism in the 1840s and Roman Catholic revivalism in the early 1850s came in for particular attack. This pattern was partly the result of a drift in editorial policy towards a less radical social and political position. Catholicism, in both its Roman and Anglican varieties, was especially vulnerable to the combination of visual and verbal parody employed by Punch because of its stress on the visual aspects of worship. Evangelicals, in contrast, employed modes of dress and architecture that were similar to those of the secular world and therefore were harder to depict as strange and peculiar. The pages of Punch therefore demonstrate not only how various Christian groups were viewed in early Victorian England but also how they attempted, with varying success, to parry and pre-empt journalistic critique.