Provides the first-ever critical discussion of the short satire Anti-Punch: or the Toy-Shop of Fleet Street (1847) by the Victorian novelist William North (1825-1854), and explores the perspective North gives on William Makepeace Thackeray's series "The Snobs of England" [later title The Book of Snobs], on changes during the later 1840s in the satirical magazine Punch (in which Thackeray's series was first published), and on Thackeray himself during a crucial year in the major novelist's own development. The essay was written in tribute to a former Edinburgh colleague, the Victorian scholar John Sutherland, whose books include not only the landmark study Thackeray at Work but also the first critical edition of Thackeray's Book of Snobs. Version attached here is uncorrected proof, not final text.