Unidentified artist
1857
Hi Art !

Cartoon
Internet - Original source ill-defined
(On wall, above the photographer)
CORRECT LIKENESS
FRAME INCLUDED
1/6
 
(with small sample portrait miniatures beneath)
 
HI ART !
 
Parent. “I SHOULD LIKE YOU TO BE VERY PARTICULAR ABOUT HIS HAIR.”
Photographic Artist (!). “OH, MUM, THE ’AIR IS HEASY ENOUGH! IT’S THE H’S WHERE WE FIND THE DIFFICULTY!”
 
Punch's Alamack for 1857.
 
In this satirical engraving from *Punch’s Almanack for 1857*, the magazine deploys humour to reflect both the novelty and rapid popularisation of commercial portrait photography in mid-Victorian Britain. By the mid-1850s the wet collodion process had dramatically lowered the cost of portraiture, allowing a wider social range of clients to visit small urban studios. The prominently advertised price of “Correct Likeness / Frame Included / 1/6” signals this democratization: a shilling and sixpence placed a photographic likeness—once an elite luxury—within reach of the working and lower-middle classes. The cramped wooden interior, simple backdrop, and rough-hewn skylight evoke the makeshift nature of many early studios, which often occupied upper rooms or temporary structures where adequate light was available. The seated, anxious child and fussing bonneted women further stage photography as a domestic and aspirational ritual, one in which likeness, propriety, and social presentation were anxiously negotiated. The cartoon underscores that photography had become not a rare spectacle but a familiar piece of everyday urban life.
 
The joke itself turns on Victorian linguistic stereotyping. The mother’s request—“be very particular about his hair”—is deliberately misheard or reframed by the photographer, who replies, “The ’air is heavy enough! It’s the H’s where we find the difficulty!” The humour depends on Cockney ‘H-dropping’, a marker of class difference, suggesting that the humble photographer struggles less with technical matters of exposure and posing than with the aspirational speech of his clientele. Punch thus uses phonetic dialect humour to situate the photographer socially below his customers even as he attempts to meet their desires. Beneath the comedy lies a more subtle cultural observation: the photographic studio was a space where class, taste, and modern technology intersected, and where the promise of a *“Correct Likeness”* exposed linguistic and social hierarchies as plainly as the camera captured faces.
 
(Alan Griffiths, 30 November 2025) I'm indebted to Richard Moore for bringing this cartoon to my attention.
 
LL/131456