About Fun

Fun

Fun was a British weekly humorous magazine published in London from 21 September 1861 to 1901. Founded as a deliberate rival to Punch, the established comic weekly, it sold for a penny — a third of Punch's price — and became known as the poor man's Punch. In its first decade it was Punch's most successful rival, the first home of W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads, and a livelier, more liberal and more lower-middle-class paper than its older competitor.

Fun prospered into the 1870s, after which it declined gradually through several ownerships and editors. It ceased publication in 1901, when it was absorbed into a rival comic paper, Sketchy Bits. Its forty-year run is now preserved in digital archives, and historians of Victorian periodicals treat it as the clearest example of how a cheap comic weekly could challenge, and for a time outshine, the great Punch.

Foundation

Fun was founded in 1861 by Charles Maclean, a London businessman who believed there was scope for a rival to Punch, which had dominated British comic journalism since 1841. Maclean established the magazine's premises at 80 Fleet Street, London, and installed the writer H. J. Byron as its titular editor, although in the early days the editing seems to have been a collective effort by Byron, Tom Hood and others. The first issue appeared on 21 September 1861.

The positioning was open and playful. Each issue of Punch featured a drawing of Mr Punch and his dog Toby; Fun parodied them with its own jester, Mr Fun, and his cat. At a penny for a weekly issue of twelve pages, Fun sold at a third of Punch's price. According to the historian Charles Barrie, it had a young upstart liveliness that Punch had by then lost, was well received, and reached a circulation of 20,000 by 1865.

A Rival's Character

The introduction to the Gale archive of Fun describes the new magazine as Punch's most successful rival, and says it surpassed the older publication in its commentary on literature, the fine arts and the theatre. The same account identifies the features that distinguished it. Fun appealed to the lower-middle class, as opposed to Punch's upper-class readership. It carried the comic strip, a genre slower to catch on in England than in France and Germany. Its politics were liberal, and its staff took a warm interest in things American, especially American humour.

Like Punch, Fun published satirical verse and parodies alongside political and literary criticism, sports and travel information, often illustrated with topical cartoons of a political nature. It was aimed at a well-educated readership interested in politics, literature and the theatre. The more conservative and establishment-minded Punch took a condescending view of its upstart competitor: William Makepeace Thackeray, a longstanding Punch contributor, dubbed the new magazine 'Funch'. Punch's editor Mark Lemon nevertheless made frequent efforts to lure Fun's best contributors away — succeeding with F. C. Burnand, but failing with Fun's star, W. S. Gilbert.

The Fun Gang

The young men who made Fun called themselves the 'Fun gang'. They frequented the Arundel Club, the Savage Club and especially Evans's Café, where they kept a table in competition with Punch's famous Round Table. The historian Jane Stedman described their bohemianism as essentially a sentimental, laughing, crusading camaraderie: they frequented cheap, unconventional clubs, had ties with a stage not yet considered respectable, and showed irreverence and independence in private and in print. Most lacked money; many were young men from professional families, with university educations and legal training, who worked in government offices and gravitated to journalism.

Encouraged by Fun's success, Byron founded another humorous paper, the Comic News, in July 1863. He was succeeded as editor of Fun by Tom Hood in May 1865, when Edward Wylam, a prosperous manufacturer of dog biscuits, bought the business. Hood, the son of the famous poet Thomas Hood, assembled the vivacious and progressive team that defined the magazine's peak years.

Peak Years, 1865 to 1874

Under Hood, Fun's contributors included the dramatist Tom Robertson, the American writer Ambrose Bierce, G. R. Sims and Clement Scott — and, most important for the magazine's fortunes, W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert was an unknown novice when Fun began, but rapidly became its most valuable asset. His Bab Ballads were almost all first published in Fun between 1861 and 1871, along with a wide range of his articles, verses, illustrations and drama criticism over a ten-year period — the apprenticeship of the librettist who would later transform English comic opera with Arthur Sullivan.

Hood was exacting, especially about verse. Clement Scott recalled that to Hood a Cockney rhyme was an abomination and a false rhythm sent him crazy, and that it was an education to be brought up under such a strict master. His other verse writers included Mortimer Collins, Edmund Yates, Jeff Prowse and Harry Leigh, and his cartoonists included Arthur Boyd Houghton, Matt Morgan and James Francis Sullivan.

Politics

Although Fun was seen as liberal beside the increasingly conservative Punch, it could cast satirical scorn or praise on either side of the political spectrum. The outstanding example given by the magazine's historians is Benjamin Disraeli, whose unorthodox character made him a frequent target of attack in the press generally, but who was praised in Fun, particularly for his Reform Bill of 1867, which greatly extended the parliamentary franchise. That willingness to judge a measure on its merits, rather than by party, was part of the independent character the Fun gang prized in itself.

The rivalry with Punch structured the magazine's whole existence. In the 1860s and 1870s, conservative Punch faced real competition from the upstart liberal journal; after about 1874, Fun's fortunes faded, and the older magazine reasserted the dominance it would keep for the rest of the century. The two staffs' competing tables at Evans's Café became a small legend of Fleet Street — a social emblem of a genuine editorial contest.

Decline After 1874

The ownership of Fun passed in 1870 to the engravers and publishers George and Edward Dalziel, who had previously engraved drawings for Punch. Two years later they transferred it to their nephew Gilbert Dalziel. After Hood's death in 1874 the quality of the content began a slow decline. Gilbert's contributions had ceased in the early 1870s, and although Fun still had talented writers including Clement Scott and Arthur Wing Pinero, it had lost the asset Stedman describes as Gilbert's unique combination of squibs, fillers, puns, verses, drawings, social and dramatic criticism, suggestions for double acrostics — a special Fun feature — absurd letters and, above all, the Bab Ballads.

Hood was succeeded as editor by Henry Sampson until 1878, after which the editorship devolved to Charles Dalziel. In 1893 the Dalziel family withdrew from the journal and Henry T. Johnson became editor. Fun was eventually bought by the publisher George Newnes, who sold it early in 1901 to Charles Shurey, proprietor of a rival comic paper. It ceased publication in the same year, absorbed into Shurey's Sketchy Bits.

The Bab Ballads and Gilbert's Legacy

Fun's strongest claim on posterity runs through a single contributor. The Bab Ballads — Gilbert's comic verses, many of them seeds of plots he would later expand into the Savoy operas — reached their first readers in Fun's pages, accompanied by Gilbert's own drawings. That a penny weekly could serve as the nursery of one of Victorian Britain's most durable comic talents illustrates the magazine's editorial quality at its peak: Hood's strict standards in verse gave a young, unknown writer a disciplined platform, weekly, for a decade.

The magazine also mattered to the history of the comic strip in Britain. By carrying strip cartoons at a time when the form was slower to catch on in England than in France and Germany, and by aiming them at a lower-middle-class rather than an elite readership, Fun helped establish the cheap illustrated comic paper as a permanent part of British publishing — the tradition from which the later Victorian comic papers, and ultimately the twentieth-century British comic, descended.

Fun Today

Fun survives complete in digital form: the Gale archive makes the full run searchable for scholars, and the University of Florida's Comics Digital Collections presents it online with zoomable page images and searchable text. Its caricatures — including its 1872 caricature of Charles Darwin — and the first appearances of Gilbert's ballads, including a Bab Ballad debut in 1867, are among the most reproduced images from the Victorian comic press.

Assessed whole, Fun was more than a Punch imitation. For its first thirteen years it was the sharper, cheaper, more democratic paper, with the better claim on new talent; for its last twenty-seven it was a survivor, passed from owner to owner as the market it had helped create moved on. Its history is the classic arc of the Victorian periodical — brilliant launch, defining decade, long afterlife — compressed into a single penny weekly.