Those who attack Mr Punch are indulging in the theatre of the absurd
SIR – Mr Punch, a figure of “colonial violence” (“White people were creators of racism, says chief librarian”, report, August 30)? What a nonsensical aspersion on the cheeky chap – voted an icon of England in a 2006 poll.
That white, Victorian patriarch, Charles Dickens – whose works can still, I’m sure, be consulted in the British Library – wrote in a letter in 1849: “The street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence.”
The Victoria & Albert Museum’s website is to be congratulated for its dispassionate and informative history of Punch and Judy, including references to the Punch and Judy College of Professors and to Punch and Judy showmen (“swatchel omis”).
That’s the way to do it! Duncan McAra Bishopbriggs, East Dunbartonshire
SIR – I was particularly surprised that a bust of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks has been singled out for posthumous accusation. At the request of Banks (as Endeavour’s chief botanist), Captain James Cook took a racially diverse team of civilian scientists with him on the Endeavour. They included George Dorlton and Thomas Richmond.
In Tahiti, Banks forged a great friendship with Tupaia, who joined the Endeavour as an honoured guest. Tupaia was a polymath who was greatly respected by Banks and Cook and was skilled in geography, meteorology, navigation and other indigenous arts. Without his help the Endeavour might not have returned to Britain. Sadly, he perished in Batavia (now Jakarta) and his death deeply upset Banks. Another Tahitian, Omai, travelled to England and was taken around the country by
Banks. While in England, Omai was feted by society. He was introduced to George III and taken to the state opening of Parliament before returning to Tahiti.
Far from plundering, Sir Joseph Banks introduced useful plants and sources of food around the world, including pigs to the indigenous people of New Zealand and breadfruit to the Caribbean and central and southern America (where it is now a staple food). James Hughes Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire
SIR – The cultural revisionists now on the attack are iconoclasts – destructive, not constructive. They are giddy with their own virtue and power, though often plain wrong in how they select their targets; they are in the process of upsetting large numbers of people, and act at no real cost to themselves – all while achieving nothing of any substance for the victims they claim to be helping. Mark Bale Oxford
SIR – Rather than fixate on our history, surely we should be using our intellectual, economic and political influence to address the many current, gross obscenities of our modern world.
Examples include the persecution of Uighurs in China; the persecution of Christians, Yazidi and Shia in Iraq and Syria; the worldwide trafficking of young girls; the lack of civil rights for citizens of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, the Yemen and beyond; and the plight of Myanmar’s Rohingya. Denise Backhouse Woking, Surrey