The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London by Patrick Leary (review)

• Published in: Victorian review 2011-10, Vol.37 (2), p.159-161
• Main Author: Shattock, Joanne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Art exhibits; Bars; Cartoons; Clubs; Gossip
• ISSN: 0848-1512; 1923-3280; 1923-3280
• DOI: 10.1353/vcr.2011.0041

The key figure in Patrick Leary’s compelling study of the dynamics of the most famous comic periodical of the last two centuries is a journalist and diarist, Henry Silver, a member of the exclusive Punch table, the small group of staff members who met each Wednesday evening for dinner at the office of the miscellany’s proprietors, Bradbury and Evans, in Bouverie Street, Whitefriars. Events of general interest, such as royal weddings, current art exhibitions, or (as in 1869) the tightrope artist Blondin’s walk across Niagara Falls, were enlisted for the cut. The Punch Brotherhood is lavishly illustrated with many of the best known cartoons: “A Leap in the Dark” (Leary fig. 4), for example, in which a horse with Disraeli’s face carries Britannia, shielding her eyes, into the unknown, following the passage of the Second Reform Bill in 1867, and the sensational “Britannia Sympathises with Columbia” (1865) (Leary fig. 18) in which Britannia is shown laying a wreath on the funeral bier of Abraham Lincoln, a dramatic reversal of Punch’s earlier support for the South in the American Civil War.