Anyone who still retains memories of the agreeably bland periodical edited during the late twentieth century by the genial Alan Coren should be warned: Amy Matthewson reveals that the Punch of Victorian times was a very different and much more disturbing beast. True, as historians of humour and cartooning such as Vic Gattrell have shown, by the time Punch was founded in 1841 the savagery of the age of Gillray and Rowlandson had faded, as the wildly corrupt elite against whom they had directed their ruderies had given way to rule by respectability. But while under Henry Mayhew, the first editor, Punch showed a certain degree of restraint, a jingoistic strain soon becomes apparent, and by the time of the Second Opium War this was well entrenched, together with the high degree of influence on public opinion that it then wielded. In his study of that war entitled The Arrow War: An Anglo-Chinese Confusion, 1856–1860 (London: Collins, 1967), Douglas Hurd quotes Punch twice as a source on contemporary pro-Palmerston political thinking, at the same time as he alludes to the willingness of Palmerston to impugn the patriotism of those like Cobden who opposed the war. Amy Matthewson shows unambiguously that this unpleasant tactic was fully supported by the magazine.

She also shows that a profoundly unappealing tone of mockery persisted regarding China right the way through from the mid-nineteenth century onward, if anything only becoming worse, especially when it became possible to contrast Chinese weakness with the rising power of Japan. A case in point would be the cartoon from 1894 examined on pp. 114–5, which shows a large and pathetic Chinese figure being beaten up by a much smaller Japanese opponent. The cartoon is accompanied by some verses in which the Chinese figure is named as “Younghy-Bung-Boo-Hoo”. Now the subtext for these verses is clearly Edward Lear's 1877 poem “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò”, but in that work Lear's humour is gentle – it is, after all, in some measure a self-portrait – whereas here the treatment is vicious and insulting throughout.

Persistent unpleasantness aside, Punch also appears to have propagated a highly misleading image of an unchanging and hopelessly outmoded China in at least one respect. Right from the start and right through to the Boxer uprising, Chinese troops are depicted as armed solely with medieval weapons – spears and shields. While it may be true that during the First Opium War some of the troops that the British encountered were from lightly armed local gendarmeries, the officers of Her Britannic Majesty might have reflected on the singular circumstance that in the recent past a Chinese expedition had been able to defeat the Gurkhas, a people so tough that when the British had with great difficulty managed to defeat them too, they were so impressed that they began to hire them as mercenaries, a practice that continues to this day. Soon enough, when British forces encountered properly trained and armed Manchu troops, they found them a much more formidable enemy. Yet the steadily rising levels of militarization in nineteenth-century China first described on the basis of his academic research by Philip Kuhn seem to have entirely escaped the attention of the British public, and indeed their armed forces: Admiral Seymour in the Second Opium War appears to have been quite surprised to have been hit by Chinese gunfire; likewise British soldiers in Tianjin in 1900 found it something of a shock when they encountered utterly unexpected levels of resistance.

In short, Mister Punch on matters Chinese turns out to have been straightforwardly a bully and a liar, uncomfortably close in personality to his seaside puppet manifestation. The research on display here is sober and systematic, introducing in detail what Punch was, how it was run, and how China was depicted in its “large cut” cartoons; from what I have seen, a study of its smaller scale imagery would simply reinforce the conclusions established. This book should at the very least be required reading on every course in Britain on “The Rise of China”, not just those to do with imagery, though as Harold Isaacs showed in his seminal 1958 study Scratches on Our Minds, cartoons form a very important part in the creation of stereotypes. But it is possible to go further: this book deserves a readership far beyond the academic world of studying China; read this book, and one will readily see the Chinese phrase “A Century of Humiliation” in a completely new light.