The Carpet-Bag, Vol. II, No. 21

The Carpet-Bag, Vol. II, No. 21 (1852)

The masthead depicts a hand grasping a carpet bag, flanked by two woodcut vignettes of domestic scenes. This Boston weekly mixed literary sketches, tall tales, light verse, and satirical woodcuts in the tradition of mid-nineteenth-century American humor periodicals. Under editor Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, The Carpet-Bag (1851–1853) published early work by Mark Twain and Artemus Ward alongside burlesque and character comedy. The publication represents a transitional moment in American comic print culture—straddling the literary miscellany and the illustrated humor paper—and helped establish Boston as a center for comic writing and visual satire in the antebellum era.