As usual, I went along. I found a nice collection of five annuals from Punch magazine in the 1870s that I almost bought; I was carrying them around as I looked at other books when I came across three volumes of Pictures from Punch. As I primarily want the magazines for the cartoons, I decided to save myself £9.50 by buying the three picture collections instead of the five full annuals.
Many of the cartoons are not remotely funny. A lot of them seem to concern fox-hunting or courting, and there's a tiresome propensity to render regional or class accents in a mockingly-phonetic form. Weak puns are popular, as are misunderstandings by ignorant foreigners, country folk and servants. Some of them, however, are genuinely amusing, and others make points that are as true today as they were back then.
Here's an example of the latter:
I shall doubtless be posting occasional other examples of such 150-year-old cartoons in the future. It's going to take me a while to read all three volumes, though, so for the moment you're spared.