It was a kind of Victorian soft porn. For over a century, The National Police Gazette was ubiquitous at men’s clubs, barber shops, saloons, general store backrooms. The Gazette was the 19^th Century forerunner of modern men’s magazines, the supermarket tabloids of my generation, and the viral news memes of today. It was also part of the changing visual culture of the late 19^th Century that seeded the ground for the flowering of newspaper cartooning to come.