British Benevolence, Joseph Keppler's Puck cover of 19 July 1882

British Benevolence is Joseph Keppler's cover for Puck of 19 July 1882. A lion in boxing gloves marked "ARMY" and "NAVY" looms over small figures labelled "EGYPTIAN," "AFGHAN" and "ASHANTEE," a "FENIAN" pulls on gloves, and the caption quotes Earl Granville on using force against the weak.

Content note: the cover contains racial caricatures of African and Middle Eastern peoples, reproduced without alteration.

The cover

Puck, published in New York by Keppler & Schwarzmann, gives this cover to British foreign policy. The archive describes a giant lion wearing boxing gloves, one marked "ARMY" and the other "NAVY," looming over small figures. Three of the figures' labels are legible in the scan: "EGYPTIAN," "AFGHAN," and "ASHANTEE" on a shield. The Library of Congress record, the archive notes, lists two more victims, a Boer and a Zulu. At right, a figure labelled "FENIAN" is pulling on gloves of his own; the record says nothing more about him.

Puck

VOL. XI.-No. 280. JULY 19, 1882. Price, 10 Cents.

"What fools these Mortals be!" MIDSUMMER-NIGHTS DREAM.

[...]

[labels:] ARMY (glove); NAVY (glove); EGYPTIAN; AFGHAN; ASHANTEE (shield); [illegible] (figure at top left); [illegible, LOC lists Boer and Zulu among the victims]; FENIAN

[signature:] J. Keppler

BRITISH BENEVOLENCE.

"It is painful to be obliged to use force against the weak."—Earl Granville in House of Lords.

Irony and its cost

The title and the quotation do the work. "British Benevolence" over a gloved lion is sarcasm, and Granville's line about the pain of using force against the weak is set under a picture of exactly that. The archive tags name-calling and gives the tell: a state's foreign policy is reduced to one animal in boxing gloves, each people to a single label, and the whole set against an ironic quotation. The record lists the purpose as "Demonize."

The cover's target is British policy. The small figures are still drawn, in the archive's words, as "racial caricatures of African and Middle Eastern peoples." A cartoon can attack a state's use of force and, in the same frame, treat the people on the receiving end as types rather than nations. The archive flags that, and so does this page.

Puck's other covers on this site

Two years earlier, James A. Wales drew Puck's Where Both Platforms Agree, in which Garfield and Hancock nail the same "Anti-Chinese" board. Keppler's own Claim Agency centerfold of November 1884 turned on domestic politics. A later Puck centerfold, The Yellow Peril of 1904, attached virtue words to one belligerent and abuse words to the other.