How Mr. Punch Stole Christmas: The Evolution of the Holiday in Periodicals

Abstract

With the cultural potency of Dickens’s early Christmas books and the illustrations within them, it is not surprising that Punch contributors occasionally kidnapped Scrooge for parody. In 1885, Punch cast Gladstone as Scrooge and the ghost of Benjamin Disraeli as Marley. An accompanying illustration imitates the well-known John Leech illustration of the hearty Christmas Present and his pile of goods, but this time a drunken Christmas Present meets Scrooge in Leech’s original setting, with the addition of a Punch Almanack mixed into the cornucopia at his feet. The text then tells how the spirit takes “Scroogestone” on a journey to view the populace: “troubled Churches and perturbed parsonages, spectres of furious squires and jubilant rustics.”¹ A few years later John Tenniel’s main cartoon for an 1893 issue, seen here in figure 2, limits its parody to the same Leech illustration. Instead of an appetizing cornucopia, Tenniel’s Christmas Present holds the torch of “Anarchy” while he sits on a small pile of foodstuff inscribed with “Eastern Question,” “Irish Question,” alongside containers of “Dynamite,” “Combustion,” and a pile of coal marked “Strike.” Leech’s sausages have become chains, and Tenniel turns the pole in front of Christmas Present’s knee into the sword of “Strife.”