Courting the colonies: Linley Sambourne, Punch, and imperial allegory

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Punch's leading topical cartoonists, John Tenniel and Linley Sambourne, were able to select from a well-established lexicon of figurative conventions (to which they had themselves contributed) for picturing global politics. Nationstates, for example, might readily be represented by caricatures of their monarchs or principal statesmen; equally, however, they might be embodied in classicised female personifications like Britannia or Columbia, epitomised in stereotypical representatives of national character like German Fritz or John Bull, or emblematised in birds and animals drawn from heraldry and beast-fable and engaged in Aesopian encounters (the British Lion, the Indian Tiger, and the French Poodle). These various iconographic systems could, moreover, be deployed in dramatic scenarios which alluded - either textually or pictorially - to the kinds of reading with which their audiences might be assumed to be familiar: with allusions to Shakespeare, to Dickens, to (with increasing frequency as the century drew to a close) the 'Alice' books - even to the sporting novels of R. S. Surtees.