Mr. Punch in the Arts: A Scrap from a Theatre Program, Nineteenth Century

The Victoria & Albert Museum

This card scrap depicting Mr. Punch in a fit-up (booth) is all that remains from a Nineteenth Century theatre program which is part of the George Speaight Punch & Judy Collection at the V&A.

Victorian people very often cut up printed materials to put them in scrapbooks or use them as part of a decoupage project. For this reason, complete printed objects from the era are hard to come by, but we can learn a lot from these surviving scraps.