Judge #189
Judge #189 belongs to one of the most consequential years in the magazine's history: 1885 was the transitional period in which founder James A. Wales sold the publication to William J. Arkell, transforming it from a struggling Puck imitator into a boldly Republican satirical weekly. Any Lincoln imagery appearing in this issue would reflect the period's cultural habit of invoking the assassinated president as a moral touchstone for the GOP — two decades after his death, Lincoln's image had become a standard rhetorical device in the Gilded Age partisan press. As one of the early American periodicals to employ chromolithographic covers and full-color centerfolds for political cartooning, Judge was itself a medium-shaping publication whose 1885 output helped define how illustrated satire could be weaponized in electoral politics. Issue-level content for this specific number, however, cannot be confirmed from any publicly accessible source.
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Judge was founded on October 29, 1881, by a cohort of dissident Puck artists — cartoonist James Albert Wales, dime-novel publisher Frank Tousey, and author George H. Jessop — who set out to rival their former employer with a comparable 16-page quarto format and chromolithographic cover art. The magazine struggled financially under Wales's editorship through the mid-1880s until 1885, when William J. Arkell purchased it; Arkell quickly recruited Puck stars Eugene Zimmerman ('Zim') and Bernhard Gillam and redirected the editorial line toward explicit Republican partisanship, making Judge a platform for attacking Grover Cleveland's Democratic administration. By 1885, the editorial helm was still held by Wales (he is listed as editor through 1885, with I. M. Gregory taking over in 1886), meaning that issue #189 falls in the final months of the founding editor's tenure, on the cusp of Arkell's transformation of the title.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Judge was founded October 29, 1881, by James Albert Wales, Frank Tousey, and George H. Jessop — all former Puck staffers — as a direct rival to that dominant satirical weekly.
- The 1885 purchase of the magazine by William J. Arkell marked a decisive turning point: he recruited Eugene Zimmerman and Bernhard Gillam away from Puck and aligned the publication firmly with the Republican Party.
- Issue #189's 1885 date places it in Volume 7 or 8 of the run (Volume 7 covers October 1884–April 1885; Volume 8 covers April–October 1885), during the editorial tenure of founder J. A. Wales and immediately before Arkell's full reorganization.
- Typical 1885 issues of Judge ran 16 pages in a quarto format with a chromolithographic cover, a full-color centerfold, and numerous black-and-white satirical cartoons and humorous text pieces.
- Abraham Lincoln's image was commonly invoked in Republican-aligned illustrated weeklies of the 1880s as a moral and political symbol, two decades after his assassination — making any Lincoln-themed cartoon in this issue consistent with Judge's emerging GOP identity.
- James Albert Wales served as editor of Judge from its founding through 1885; Grant E. Hamilton joined as a key cartoonist in this same period and served as art editor for over two decades.
- No copyright renewals are on record for any issue or contribution to Judge magazine, and Internet Archive scans (microfilm) of the relevant volumes are publicly accessible through the University of Pennsylvania's online serials catalog.
- The specific contents of Judge #189 — including the nature or artist of any Abraham Lincoln cartoon — could not be identified in any publicly accessible database, key-issue site, or collector resource consulted.