Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive

Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive

November 7, 2025 – The British Library, London, UK.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Dr. Patrick Leary, historian of the Victorian press and author of The Punch Brotherhood. Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (2010)

Pr Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), Principal Investigator of the AHRC/NEH-funded Finding A Place: A research project to advance digital methods and unlock the use of digitized bookillustrations in cultural institutions

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For over 150 years, Punch magazine was renowned for its original and provocative satire. From early cartoons such as John Leech’s anti-establishment “Substance and Shadow” (1843) to its later conservative social commentary, Punch’s pithy observations on both national and international affairs ensured the longevity of its success and confirmed the brand as a cornerstone of the British popular press. As a mass media trailblazer for both the visual and verbal, moreover, the magazine’s innovative branding model enabled its publishers to branch out into new markets and alternative formats such as the almanack and the pocket book.

The Punch Archive attests to the historical and cultural import of the brand and its evolving publication portfolio through its eclectic range of print culture materials and artefacts. Acquired by the British Library in 2004, it comprises three sub-fonds – the records of Punch; the financial archive of Bradbury and Evans, and Bradbury, Agnew and Co., successive owners and publishers of the magazine; and the papers of Richard Geoffrey G. Price, a Punch contributor – all of which, to this day, remain largely unknown to both the academic community and the wider public. Among these resources is the Henry Silver bequest which, besides personal correspondence, notebooks and diaries, comprises hundreds of unexplored original preparatory drawings and proofs by Punch artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Archive also includes a full collection of Punch’s Pocket Book (1843-1881), a lavishly illustrated annual which, over a period of forty years, efficiently promoted the brand.

In line with Punch’s Pocket Book Archive, an international digitisation project which proposes to deliver an open-access database based on a full run of these annuals, a symposium entitled “Pictorial Punch – Treasures from the Archive” will take place at the British Library on 7 November 2025. Organised by the Punch’s Pocket Book Archive team with the support of the Archives and Manuscripts Department, the event seeks to explore the breadth and diversity of this unplumbed material, and provide an opportunity for experts and enthusiasts alike to discover and discuss the Archive’s extensive catalogue, as well as other related items within the British Library’s collections. It will feature keynote presentations by two renowned specialists of nineteenth-century periodical studies, Dr. Patrick Leary, historian of the Victorian press and author of The Punch Brotherhood. Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (The British Library, 2010), and Pr Julia Thomas (Cardiff University), Principal Investigator of the AHRC/NEH-funded Finding A Place: A research project to advance digital methods and unlock the use of digitized bookillustrations in cultural institutions, and a high-profile expert on Victorian visual and material culture.

Possible topics to explore include, but are not limited to:

• Material from the Punch Archive, particularly unexplored items and collections
• Special collections curatorial practices – Approaches, strategies, impact.
• Bradbury & Evans / Bradbury, Evans & Agnew publishing house.
• Punch cartoons and cartoonists (19^th-20^th c.)
• Women and other underrepresented groups in the Archive
• The mechanics of image publishing (from the sketch to the page)
• The Punch brand and extensive range of by-products
• Punch contributors: writers, artists, editors, engravers, photographers
• Digital preservation of nineteenth-century archival material
• Punch’s impact on the print culture of the 19^th-20^th c.
• Punch responses and versions from around the world

Submission Guidelines: We invite proposals for 20-minute individual papers. Proposals of 300 words, along with a short biographical note, should be sent to PPBkACaen@gmail.com by May 30, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 16, 2025.        

Bibliography:
Primary sources:
The Punch Archive at the British Library (Archives and Manuscripts)
Brooks, Charles William Shirley. Diary (1867, 1872). Punch Archive. British Library, London.
———. Diaries (1869, 1871, 1873). London Library.
Burnand, Francis C. “The Punch Pocket Books.” Pall Mall Magazine 36 (August 1905): 190–97.
———. Records and Reminiscences, Personal and General. Vol. 1. London: Methuen, 1904.
Silver, Henry. Complete transcript of Henry Silver’s diary by R. G. G. Price. Punch Archive. British Library.
 
Secondary sources:
Altick, Richard D. Punch. The Lively Youth of a British Institution 1841-1851. Columbus: Ohio State University,
1997.
Baillet, Françoise. “The Punch Pocket Book: A Victorian Business Venture (1843–81)” Victorian Periodicals Review
Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2020, pp. 238-266.
Brake, Laurel. “Supplements,” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor
(eds.), London: The British Library and Academia Press, 2009.
———. Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition http://www.ncse.ac.uk/commentary/paratextual.html
Eckert, Lindsey and Julia Grandison. The Almanac Archive: Theorizing Marginalia and “Duplicate” Copies in the
Digital Realm, Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) vol. 10, issue 1, 2016.
http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/10/1/000240/000240.html
Fyfe, Paul, Antony Harrison, David B. Hill, Sharon L. Joffe and Sharon Setzer. Victoria’s Lost Pavilion. From
Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics to Digital Humanities, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Horrocks, Clare, Brian Maidment, and Valerie Stevenson. “Punch” Re-Rooted: Comedy and the Periodical Press
1820–1850. Liverpool: Liverpool John Moores University, 2013.
Leary, Patrick. “Googling the Victorians.” Journal of Victorian Culture 10 (1), 2005, pp. 72–86.
———. The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London. London, The British
Library, 2010.
McGann, Jerome. “The Future Is Digital.” Journal of Victorian Culture 13 (1), 2008, pp. 80–88
——— (ed.). The Rossetti Archive, IATH and NINES, Non dated.
Maidment, Brian and Julia Thomas, Jonathan Smith, John van Wyhe, Juliet John. “Reviews of Digitised Scholarly
Resources,” Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 108-24,
https://doi.org/10.3366/E1355550208000131
Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
———. “The Passing of Print: Digitising Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital,” Media History 18(1),
Special Issue: Ephemera (February 2012), pp. 77-92.
Spielmann, Marion H. The History of Punch. London : Cassell & Co., 1895.
Thomas, Julia. Nineteenth-Century Illustration and the Digital. Studies in Word and Image. Palgrave Macmillan,
2017.
———, Tim Killick, Anthony Mandal, and David Skilton (eds.). Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved
Illustration, Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research,Cardiff U., 2011 https://www.dmvi.org.uk/
Wisnicki, Adrian S., ‘Digital Victorian Studies Today’, VLC, vol. 44, no. 4 (Winter 2016), pp. 975–92.