The Carpet-Bag, Vol. II, No. 15

The Carpet-Bag, Vol. II, No. 15 (1852)

The masthead features an ornamental frame with a hand holding the title aloft, flanked by vignettes of domestic and street scenes. Below sits a woodcut cartoon: rats and mice gathered around a wheel of "Public Cheese," a visual pun on abundance and shared consumption.

Edited by Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, The Carpet-Bag was Boston's premier humor weekly, mixing burlesque, tall tales, light verse, and satirical sketches with woodcut illustrations. Published 1851–1853, it occupied a distinct niche between literary periodicals and popular entertainment—publishing Mark Twain's first nationally circulated sketch and early work by Artemus Ward. Such papers were engines of American comic writing, circulating irreverent humor and visual wit to middle-class readers and establishing conventions that shaped later comic publication.