As one of the most emblematic Victorian illustrated papers, Punch is famous for its coverage of topical events, political as well as social and artistic. With its stage-like setting and conventional system of language, the black-and-white image of the mid-Victorian era – the Punch vignette in particular – provides an interesting record of contemporary life. But beyond its denotative function, graphic art may also be considered for its ideological content. In an age when, as Martin Meisel suggests, different art forms – paintings, plays and novels – gradually adopted common styles and idioms in a way that cut across generic boundaries Punch's widely circulated serialised vignettes seem to have played a significant role in the articulation of a cultural discourse (Meisel 1983: 3). ‘[A] shaping and defining mechanism’ (Pointon 1993: 4), they offered a privileged space in which contemporary notions of class, rank and gender could be explored.

Punch's interest for moral, social and occupational ‘types’ existed from the magazine's earliest days. A legacy of the literary genre of the ‘character’ and of the graphic tradition of ‘physiologies’ – itself largely inspired by the writings of Johan Casper Lavater (1741–1801) – the depiction of ‘types’ assumed a Platonician equation between an individual's physical characteristics and their moral value. In the tradition of Rowlandson's Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders (1820), the Punch artists produced a visual archaeology of occupational types, providing a reassuring portrayal of an increasingly complex world. In this age of substantial economic, political and intellectual transformation, insecurities concerning income, prospects and more importantly status were common, generating a sharpening of class consciousness, a need among the Victorians to debate and discuss the social order ‘with unprecedented urgency, intensity and anxiety’ (Cannadine 1993: 62). And while social anxieties were keener among the middle-class groups, to which the magazine's readership largely belonged, Punch's visual taxonomy allowed the (re)tracing of boundaries perceived as dangerously blurred. Bringing order into an ever-increasing variety of human types thus permitted a symbolic reordering of the Victorian society.

With his ‘opposition […] to social norms, fetishising artifice and individualism’ (Hatt 1999: 249), the figure of the avant-garde artist was, from the beginning, a target of choice for the Punch cartoonists.