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    The role of visual appearance in Punch’s early-Victorian satires on religion

    Janes, Dominic (2014) The role of visual appearance in Punch’s early-Victorian satires on religion. Victorian Periodicals Review 47 (1), pp. 66-86. ISSN 0709-4698.

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    Abstract

    Satires on various aspects of contemporary religion can frequently be found in the early Victorian editions of Punch. The more strident forms of Protestant evangelicalism, in the earlier 1840s, and Roman Catholic revivalism, around 1850, came in for particular attack. This pattern was partly the result of a drift in the editorial policy of the publication towards a less radical social and political position. However, Catholicism, in both its Roman and Anglican varieties, was particularly vulnerable to the combination of visual and verbal parody employed by Punch because of that denomination’s stress on visual aspects of worship. Evangelicals, by contrast, employed modes of dress and architecture that were similar to those of the secular world of their time and were, thereby, harder to depict as strange and peculiar. The pages of Punch can, therefore, tell us not only about how various Christian groups were viewed in early Victorian England but also about the ways in which they attempted, with varying success, to parry and pre-empt critique in the print media.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Research Centres and Institutes: Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR)
    Depositing User: Dominic Janes
    Date Deposited: 15 Apr 2014 13:59
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:10
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/9524

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