Codman’s Punch & Judy Show, Lime Street, Liverpool, c.1909. A Punch & Judy Show had been presented regularly on this site for over forty years by the time this photograph was taken. The original Liverpool show was staged in 1868 by Richard Codman, but his son Richard Mortimer Codman had taken over in 1888. Due to redevelopment of the site, the show has moved from Lime Street, but the tradition is maintained to this day at Liverpool’s Albert Dock.
While Punch & Judy shows are often considered a traditional part of the Victorian and Edwardian seaside holiday, they thrived in towns and cities as well, and can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Travelling puppeteers regularly visited towns on their market days, offering entertainment with moral undertones!
Henry Mayhew, in his 1861 book London Labour and the London Poor, included a Punch & Judy script, and the detailed reminiscences of a puppeteer who claimed to be making £2 a day in 1860. ‘The best pitch of all in London is Leicester Square’, he told Mayhew, ‘there’s all sorts of classes there, you see, passing there. Then comes Regent Street (the corner of Burlington Street is uncommon good), and there’s a good publican there besides. We don’t do much in the city. People has their heads all full of business there, and them as is greedy arter the money, ain’t no friend of Punch’s.’
The puppeteers invariably referred to themselves as ‘professors’ and the best known was undoubtedly Richard Codman, whose original show in Llandudno started in 1860, predating the famous Liverpool show by eight years. The Codman family still operates Punch & Judy shows in several locations, and prides itself in having been ‘Established 150 years’.