I went to the very interesting Linley Sambourne house in Kensington yesterday (website here with amusing video). Linley Sambourne was an illustrator for Punch magazine, a popular satirical magazine of the late 19th and 20th centuries. There were a lot of his Punch cartoons on display in the house (it was Punch magazine which gave the word 'cartoon' its modern meaning, as I mentioned in this post), and I noticed that they were entitled Punch or the London Charivari.
Punch used the term the London Charivari as the journal was based on an existing French satirical newspaper, which was called Le Charivari. Charivari is in the Oxford English Dictionary, and there is a citation dating back to 1735, which is before the era of the French publication (which launched in 1832). It is defined as "A serenade of ‘rough music’, with kettles, pans, tea-trays, and the like, used in France, in mockery and derision of incongruous or unpopular marriages, and of unpopular persons generally; hence a confused, discordant medley of sounds; a babel of noise". The 1735 citation is from a translation of Pierre Bayle's biographical dictionary, and reads "A Charivary, or Mock Music, given to a Woman that was married again immediately after the Death of her Husband".
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