Brian Maidment

Victorian Periodicals and Academic Discourse

Among contemporary scholarly periodicals the Victorian Periodicals Review and the Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History are the specialist focus of research and they bring together empirical information in a cumulative way as well as permitting some investigation of the complexities of editorial policy, readership analysis or ideological position. The common purpose and will of these periodicals is readily apparent, but so are the disparate purposes and methodologies of the contributors, and it is useful to try to think why so little of this specialist, formalistic, approach to periodicals has been taken up elsewhere in scholarly publishing.

The Presence of Punch in the Nineteenth Century

The central project of this book is to consider the ways in which the London based weekly journal Punch (1842–2002) served the nineteenth century world as a model for, an influence on, or a legitimating force for satirical magazines published outside Britain, often in societies both geographically and culturally remote from British Victorian metropolitan culture. In this context, it is important to begin by reconsidering those characteristics of Punch that established and maintained its transcultural public presence throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Defining such characteristics clearly requires discussion both of the wide range of genres and humorous modes through which Punch’s ‘content’ was constructed and of the variety of self-conscious business practices through which the magazine sustained its early celebrity. Many cultural historians, most notably R. D. Altick, have mined Punch for its views, expressed both verbally and visually, on contemporary events, and the magazine remains, along with the Illustrated London News, a frequently cited illustrative resource for thinking about Victorian politics, manners and public events. The pure and uninterrupted fecundity of Punch has made it irresistible to historians, who have quarried its thousands of pages and images in pursuit of its expressed attitudes towards even the most trivial of subjects. Such fecundity clearly makes the task of writing a general overview of the magazine here an impossible task. Altick took over 500 pages to discuss merely what Punch thought about the world between 1841 and 1851, the first 10 years and 20 half yearly volumes of its existence. There were, to cite one unexpected minor Punch obsession, over 50 images of dustmen in the first 20 volumes. But given the particular focus of this book, it seems necessary to approach Punch via a slightly different route, beginning with a brief overview of its history, then moving on to consider the generic complexity of its content, with complex shifts between satire, invective, travesty, burlesque and whimsy, before concentrating on its physical manifestations, or perhaps its ‘aura’ (to use a term borrowed from Walter Benjamin). The aim is to suggest how Punch constructed itself, or was constructed as, a hugely powerful and widespread ‘presence’ in Victorian culture.

The Illuminated Magazine and the Triumph of Wood Engraving

The Illuminated Magazine was one among the many illustrated 1s monthly magazines which characterised the nascent entrepreneurship and rapid development of the periodical idea in the 1830s and 1840s. It was short lived, running to three volumes between 1843 and 1844 under its first editor, the playwright, journalist and progressive thinker Douglas Jerrold, before slipping into oblivion after two further, increasingly eccentric volumes under the guidance of the engraver, poet and political activist W J Linton, who wound up the project after printing his doggerel epic ‘The Poorhouse Fugitives’ in the fifth and final volume in 1845. Each 64-page monthly issue used the squarish, double column page popularised by Punch, a conspicuously versatile shape for a publication containing a wide variety of illustrations.1 And illustrations were, as its title suggests, central to the Illuminated Magazine. The magazine continued to use the single page etchings and engravings which characterised the publication of fiction in the 1830s and 1840s, but also incorporated into the text a large number of wood-engraved images which might be called ‘vignettes’ were it not for the energy and boldness with which they commandeer space within the double column page, often shaping themselves into complex geometric forms very different to the soft-edged rounded shapes usually associated with end-grain wood-engraved vignettes. Nor can these illustrations properly be called ‘small’, as many of them bully the circumambient text into secondary importance. These wood-engraved images were used variously as column headings, as capital letters, as borders or as endpieces much in the style of eighteenth-century steel or copper engraved flourishes.

The Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration (review)

Many readers of the Journal of Victorian Culture will know about the ‘Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration’ (hereafter DVMI) largely because Julia Thomas, David Skilton and the team at the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research at Cardiff, who have worked on the project since 2004, have been assiduous in their attendance at conferences and academic events, and ever eager to consult, discuss and demonstrate their work. An AHRC funded project, DVMI has sought not just to assemble a particular but comprehensive body of a certain kind of illustration and make it available in the most helpful and refined way possible using current electronic and digital technology, but also to ask scholars a number of key questions about the nature of ‘illustration’ as a mode endlessly negotiating between textuality and visuality. Clearly there is also an implied polemic here about ‘subordination’, a riposte to the crudely evidential uses to which images are still frequently subjected by textually focussed academics, and a plea for the visuality of Victorian texts to be emphatically re-instated. Put simply, which, in the light of the above is a difficult thing to do, the DVMI might seem a worthwhile but small-scale project – a data base of nearly 900 wood engraved illustrations taken from periodicals and books published in 1862, seeking comprehensiveness within the terms of its own definitions of ‘literary illustration’, but acknowledging that, even for a single year’s output of this kind, profusion reigns. The assembled images have been drawn mainly a number of repositories, including Cardiff University Library, the Ashmolean Museum and a fortuitously identified collection of illustrations held in Aberystwyth. At the meekest level, then, DVMI has established a useful repository of images, reproduced at high resolution in an invitingly usable form, and drawn variously by well known artists such as Millais, by specialist illustrators like Arthur Boyd Houghton or Frederick Walker, and by relatively obscure, or even nameless, artists and engravers drawn into the jobbing marketplace by the development of, especially, monthly

The Gallery of Comicalities: Graphic Humour, Wood-Engraving, and the Development of the Comic Magazine, 1820–1841

Abstract:This paper considers the contribution of “The Gallery of Comicalities,” a feature published in the weekly Bell’s Life in London (1827–38), to the history of periodical illustration. The first part of this analysis considers the source of the “Gallery” illustrations, which were initially derived from previously published work by George Cruikshank but then commissioned from young draughtsmen. The second part suggests that these illustrations were more complex and socially engaged than commentators have suggested. The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the “Gallery” contributed to social realist graphic reportage later in the Victorian period.

Subversive Supplements: Satirical Title Pages of the Periodical Press in the 1830s

‘Subversive Supplements’ is focussed on a group of nearly twenty parodic title pages of magazines and journals produced between 1832 and 1836 as single plate lithographed caricatures. Charles Jameson Grant, a shadowy but prolific satirical artist, was responsible for the bulk of these images, but others were produced by William Newman and John Phillips. As well as their value as evidence of the nature of the complex changes taking place within the print market in this decade, these prints offer an extremely interesting and often hostile comment on the emergence of what might be called ‘middlebrow’ mass circulation periodicals associated, in varying degrees, with a widespread social awareness of ‘the march of intellect’ and its implications.

Punch in Heidelberg and Beyond: A Report from Brian Maidment

The connection between research on Victorian Periodicals and the “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows” Cluster of Excellence at Heidelberg University is not immediately obvious, but it is, nonetheless, an extremely close one. A three-day workshop held in Heidelberg on 13–15 November 2009 took as its subject “The British Punch Magazine as a Transcultural Format of Satire and Caricature,” and brought together the Cluster’s staff and students with widely published experts from many parts of the world to consider the impact of Punch on satirical journalism in India, Egypt, Turkey, China, and Japan. The use of the Punch name was apparent in all these cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth century both as a generalised cultural presence that licensed various kinds of satirical magazines and as, in many instances, a precise source of images, ideas, and precedents for localised journalistic ventures, some of which were directed at expatriate communities. The workshop, building on the Research Cluster’s collaborative work on the presence of Punch, thus considered both the cultural and historical specificity of the various “Punches” and crypto-Punches published in such diverse places as Yokohama, Shanghai, Maharashtra, and Cairo, and broader issues to do with the transmigration of satirical literary forms, visual tropes, and periodical genres between cultures. In particular the workshop was asked to consider, to quote from its organiser Hans Harder, the significance of satire as a “particularly apt literary means of tackling cultural asymmetries inherent in colonial and imperial power constellations” and the ways in which Punch was recontextualised in, or re-appropriated by, the particular cultural moment of its re-making. As a participant, I found the workshop both eye-opening and immensely invigorating, with all the discussions challenging narrowly national approaches to scholarly debate. Although some of Punch’s imitators are fairly well known to specialists, I had little understanding of the extent to which Punch, (or perhaps more accurately the idea of Punch) informed