Punch, or The London Charivari, was a British weekly magazine famous for its illustrated commentary and satire of politics and culture across the nineteen century and twentieth century. Mr Punch became a cultural icon: part jester, part national mascot.
In May and June 1854, Punch celebrated the grand opening of Crystal Palace and Park in Sydenham. Articles in the magazine covered events and fanfare surrounding that occasion. Feature articles reviewed major events at the park and highlighted visitor attractions. Punch offered readers a summary for some of the specialist courts in the glasshouse. Punch also helped readers follow activities swirling around the Crystal Palace Company. In 1854-55, controversy circled around Sunday openings and the availability of alcohol within the attraction.
It’s in 1855 that Punch illustrators produced two of the – now – famous cartoons referencing Crystal Palace dinosaurs. One shows a man asleep and dreaming of the dinosaurs. A second shows an adult male walking a child amongst the statues. The child is crying. The caption reads, “A visit to the antediluvian reptiles at Sydenham – Master Tom strongly objects to having his mind improved”. Far and away the most famous illustration for Crystal Palace Dinosaurs was the New Year’s Eve Dinner in the Iguanodon Model, which appeared in January 1854 in The Illustrated London News, the sober weekly magazine rival to Punch.
Publication Record
“A Visit to the Antediluvian Reptiles at Sydenham” first appeared in Punch’s Almanack for 1855. The almanack was sold prior to Christmas of the preceding year. The formal year of publication for this cartoon, therefore, is 1854. This might confuse casual viewers as the full title for the magazine issue is “Punch’s Almanack for 1855”. Formally, it is a supplement, with separate pagination. The publisher presented it as a preface to the year, and the Almanack normally appears in annual volumes as front matter. Punch’s Almanack issues normally sold in significantly higher numbers than regular issues.
“A Visit to the Antediluvian Reptiles at Sydenham” shows five of the original Waterhouse Hawkins statues, including one of the two Iguanodon statues (the standing Iguanodon, which is shown top left), Megalosaurus (top right), Hylaeosaurus (lower right), Teleosaurus (lower center), and Ichthyosaurus (lower left). Two white people, one adult and one child, are walking through the landscape of Secondary Island. Likely, this is a schoolmaster or private tutor and his charge. Alternatively, it is a father and son. By dress, the “Master Tom” is a child in a new-money business class family. By gesture, the adult is lecturing the boy while on their route.
Those familiar with the real landscape of Secondary Island will notice the placement of statues and their orientation are not accurate – i.e., this is not how the statues are placed in the island. No doubt, the artist was working to concentrate content within the magazine’s dense format. Specific depictions of individual statues are surprisingly accurate. With the exception of Ichthyosaurus, defining features are deftly captured.
The caption makes reference to educational improvement. Amusement and education were two purposes in tension at Crystal Palace. To justify the considerable effort and expense used in the creation of these displays, Waterhouse Hawkins stressed the importance of visual education as a path for moral and intellectual improvement. For him, “seeing” offered a compact pedagogical tool for “learning”. This applied to all people of all classes and genders. For Waterhouse Hawkins, the sculptures formed part of a complex set of geological illustrations. He promoted the concept of visual education when giving talks about his Crystal Palace project. The two guidebooks, the general Guide to Crystal Palace and Park and the Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World, provide supporting detail for that visual education.
Both Waterhouse Hawkins and directors of the Crystal Palace Company were keen to highlight educational and improving elements of their attraction. Learning transformed fun and play into socially respectable activities. It also added value to the park far able what was possible through crass amusements designed for the working class half-penny.
Mr Punch’s joke here is the child’s resistance to Victorian improvers. Master Tom is not afraid of the animals. He is resisting the constant barrage of education and worthiness towards betterment. He is not on a simple day out in Crystal Palace; rather, he is being dragged through yet another improving exercise. Do-gooders and the morality business were regular targets for Mr Punch. Waterhouse Hawkins is not escaping the magazine’s gentle ribbing over his proclaimed pedagogical designs.
Two Surprises From A Closer Look
Two surprises come from a closer examination of “A Visit to the Antediluvian Reptiles at Sydenham”.
First, focus on the standing Iguanodon in the upper left. Look at the tip of its nose. A chirping bird has snuck into the picture. It rests on the misplaced rhinoceros-like horn. Surprise! In fact, this element of the engraving might have a source in reality. Robins are familiar and curious visitors to the statues. It’s possible the artist saw such a scene and included it onto the image.
Second, and more critically, remember we normally see this image circulating in isolation, clipped from its original setting in the Almanack. The full page has a second image of Crystal Palace, “Crystal Palace – Some Varieties of the Human Race”. This depicts a fictional scene in the Natural History Department in the west side of the main galleries in the glass house. In the original floorpan for the building, a refreshment court sat adjacent to the Natural History Department, overlooking the natural history and also overlooking the south-facing gardens.
In the foreground of the cartoon, two white, fashionably dressed women sit at a table in the Refreshment Court enjoying glacé, or some other kind of confection. In the background, a dark-skinned man of aboriginal appearance welds shield and spear. Further in the background are other dark-skinned individuals whose most distinctive features are lip plates.
The scene is spatially accurate. In the west transept, the Natural History Department in fact had such ethnographic displays. Those displays were immediately adjacent to a refreshment court in which visitors could sit at tables to enjoy refreshments. Sculptures of these types were included in the natural history displays as ethnographic illustrations associated with different colonised spaces. The scene depicted could be something a cartoonist’s eye on a scene directly observed, at least to an approximation.
The explicit invocation of contrast and hierarchy in this cartoon draws the viewer into the anthropological contrast highlighted in the caption: savage and civilised. Lip plates were visual signals frequently used in Punch during this period to denote African exoticism and a racialised “primitive”. The same invocation is present in the visual contrasts in the cartoon between clothed and naked, war and peace, feminine and masculine. Crystal Palace in Sydenham served as a giant vehicle for expressing hierarchy, contrast, and racialisation. This scene draws that project into a quickly communicated microcosm. Models of ethnographic materials are shown in Delamotte’s famous photographs.
Full page from Punch
