The Boy who chalked up "No Popery!" and then ran away!—Lord John Russell and the Bill for Preventing the Assumption of Ecclesiastical Titles by Roman Catholics. (John Leech, in Punch.)
Explanation by Earl Russell in 1874: "The object of that bill was merely to assert the supremacy of the Crown. It was never intended to prosecute.... Accordingly a very clever artist represented me in a caricature as a boy who had chalked up 'No Popery' upon a wall, and then ran away. This was a very fair joke.... When my object had been gained, I had no objection to the repeal of the bill."—Recollections and Suggestions, p. 210.
One happy consequence of the new taste was the publication of Punch, which has been ever since the chief vehicle of caricature in England. As long as caricature was a thing of the shop-windows only, its power was restricted within narrow limits. Since the founding of Punch, in 1841, about two years after the conclusion of the "Pickwick Papers," caricature has become an element in periodical literature, from which it will perhaps never again be separated. And it is the pictures in this celebrated paper which have prolonged its life to this day. It owes its success chiefly to artists. There was and is an error in the scheme of the work which would have been speedily fatal to it but for the ever-welcome pictures of Richard Doyle, John Leech, John Tenniel, Du Maurier, and their companions.
John Leech.
One of the rarest products of the human mind is a joke so good that it remains good when the occasion that gave rise to it is past. Probably the entire weekly harvest of wit and humor gathered from the whole earth would not fill a number of Punch with "good things;" and if it did, no one could enjoy so many all at once, and the surfeit would sicken and disgust. The mere sitting-down for the purpose of being funny in a certain number of lines or pages is death to the comic powers; and hence it is that a periodical to which nearly the whole humorous talent of England has contributed is sometimes dull in its reading, and we wonder if there can be in any quarter of the globe a person so bereft of the means of entertainment as to get quite through one number. Once or twice a year, however, Punch originates a joke which goes round the world, and remains part of the common stock of that countless host who are indebted to their memory for their jests.
But the pictures are almost always amusing, and often delightful. The artists have the whole scene of human life, public and private, to draw from, and they are able by their pencils to vividly reproduce the occasions that gave birth to their jokes.