ONE of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life’ was Charles Dickens’s verdict on Punch and Judy shows, in a letter written in the winter of 1849. Two centuries earlier, Charles II’s view had evidently been similar. In October 1662, the King rewarded one Pietro Gimonde, a puppeteer from northern Italy known as Signor Bologna, with a gold medal and chain valued at the considerable sum of £25 for a special performance of an ‘Italian puppet play’ at Whitehall.
For generations of British children, Punch and Judy shows performed in striped canvas booths by travelling puppeteers at the seaside, on city streets and at country fairs have given just such respite from everyday reality.
The shows’ ingredients are improbable: a parrot-voiced hunchback with a hook nose, an evil smile and, consistent through 350 years, a ghastly taste for domestic violence and the wholesale disparagement of his long-suffering wife, Judy, as well as a frankly unnatural attitude towards his offspring.
Even in Dickensian London, protesters objected roundly to Mr Punch and his horrible antics. Detractors have continued to protest ever since. Dickens’s response was two-fold. To the correspondent who begged his support in banning Punch and Judy shows, he replied: ‘I regard it as quite harmless in its influence and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct
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