Victorian Periodicals Review

If not for Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite’s dedicated interest, “Marie Duval” (1847–90) might well have continued to languish as a subject of scholarly interest, the true extent and importance of her work obscured by the complexities of her many adopted identities and by the ascription of many of her cartoons in Judy to her husband, C. H. Ross, who edited the magazine. The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism acknowledges that Emilie de Tessier (Duval’s birth name) “took on the majority of the drawing of Ally Sloper” (Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism [London: Academia Press, 2009], 327). Richard Scully concentrates on William Boucher’s political cartoons as the central defining feature of Judy, though he concedes that after 1869 it was “the ‘clever lady’ Duval, rather than her husband who chronicled the further adventures of Ally Sloper” (Eminent Victorian Cartoonists [London: Political Cartoon Society, 2018], 2:65). But it has taken the combined and unrelenting efforts of Grennan, Sabin, and Waite to establish Duval’s full importance for understanding late Victorian popular culture. In 2018 they published Marie Duval, a lightly annotated but lively and visually arresting anthology of Duval’s work for Judy, which showed for the first time how extensively her cartoons had proliferated beyond the Ally Sloper strips already associated with her name. Their Marie Duval Archive offers an extensive, versatile, and easily accessible online database comprising over 950 of the cartoonist’s images, prefaced with the unequivocal view that “Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century” (https://www.marieduval.org). And now comes their collaborative monograph on Duval. The authors bring rich experience and scholarship in various forms of popular culture to this endeavour. Sabin is renowned as a media-savvy historian of comics. Among much else, Grennan has written graphic novels including a reworking of Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate. Waite has a background in street theatre and popular [End Page 653] performance. Together they bring more to their subject than the traditional English literature, art history, and history disciplines that inform most scholarly work on periodicals.

The multiple authors work together to recover and document Duval’s complex creative life. Sabin’s opening chapter describes her career at Judy and offers an analysis of her graphic originality, which brought some “vernacular and untutored,” “loose and gestural” pizazz to Judy’s “serio-comic” brief, often in the form of a comic strip (23). In chapter 3, Waite provides a chronological account of Duval’s career as an actress, no easy feat given the absence of many texts and the difficulties of researching and interpreting lost performances. Sabin offers a detailed account in the fourth chapter of Duval’s children’s book, Queens and Kings and Other Things (1874), “a spectacular comedy book, notable for the quality of its production and the freewheeling recklessness of its content” (99). These three chapters gain immeasurably from being able to cite the Marie Duval Archive and suggest the creative ways in which digital resources can interact with more traditionally presented research.

While such a detailed biographical account of Duval is important, the book’s more contextual and speculative chapters pose valuable challenges to the reader. Given the complexities, obscurities, and sheer variety of her creative output, Duval’s career asks difficult questions about, for example, the ways in which she drew on her theatrical experience beyond the theatre. In response to questions like these, Grennan’s chapter “Marie Duval and the Woman Employee” centres on the “creation of new identities, derived from reciprocal negotiations between entrenched and emerging concepts of femininity and masculinity, relative to the business of periodical print” in order to suggest connections between Duval’s stage performances and her performance of femininity in her graphic work (58). Both frequently subverted traditional definitions of gender, work, and what Grennan calls “visual journalism” (63). Crucially...