Scrap of the Day: An Antique Pantomime Scene, 1890

Scrap
Cut-out, 1890
The Victoria & Albert Museum

We’ve looked at several Victorian scraps over the past year. I have a fondness for these carefully cut-out images and am always glad to see them. To me, it’s miraculous that they’ve survived because someone took the time to preserve them—a century ago.


Scraps first appeared in the early Nineteenth Century as black and white engravings which were later colored by hand. By the 1820s, they had begun to be more elaborate, sometimes embossed. By the 1830’s scraps began to be printed in color and coated with a gelatin or gum layer to give them a gloss finish and help keep them sturdy. Scraps were meant to be cut out by adults or children and stuck into albums, on to screens or boxes, or used for decorating greetings cards.

Here, we see a scrap that is in the form of a decorative letter R that is composed of characters that were popular in Nineteenth Century pantomime - the Clown, Harlequin and Pantaloon. The scene depicted here is a version of a trick invented in the 1814 pantomime that Harlequin Whittington described in The Morning Post of December 27, 1814, “Much mirth was effected not by Harlequin, but by the Clown, who forces a mop-stick through a cheese, to make a wheel, and placing this between his hands, he plies several cheeses on his back, and using his legs as the handles of the barrow, fairly wheels the load of the stage.”

Of course, we see the resemblance of the clown to Joseph Grimaldi.  Whether or not he's meant to be the clown who inspired Mr. Punch's white-faced friend, we can't tell, but there's certainly an influence.

Here's a version of the same scene as it would have appeared before being cut out.