Description of the Project:Punch, or the London Charivari (1841-2002) is certainly one of Britain’s central cultural institutions.
Launched in July 1841 in the satirical tradition of Figaro in London (1831-1834) and the Parisian Charivari (1832-1937), it quickly relinquished the unpolished humour of its predecessors to become a well-mannered observer of its times, whose political, scientific and cultural evolutions it went on to mock for 150 years.
Among the cluster of Punch related products circulated by the magazine’s publishers, Bradbury & Evans, in the early 1840s was a little annual called Punch’s Pocket Book (1843-1881).
Designed to appeal to an urban, mobile and affluent readership, it was a sextodecimo notebook bound in soft leathercombining serious information with amusement.
Its first part offered up-to-date business information, a diary and memoranda section, while the second part, devoted to light reading and entertainment, contained a selection of stories, songs, ballads, and cartoons similar to those found in the weekly magazine itself.
Its main selling point was a fold-out hand-coloured frontispiece drawn by Punch’s senior cartoonists, whose work it efficiently showcased.
Punch’s Pocket Book Archiveis an international digital project the primary objective of which is to create a fully searchable archive from a complete run of Punch’s Pocket Books.
It is based on extant copies of the annual in four main collections: a private collection (33 vols.), the Punch Archive at the British Library (66 vols.), the holdings of Sambourne House Museum, London (38 volumes), and the Robert D.
Farber Archives and Special Collections Library at Brandeis University (38 vols.).
Its scope is expected to expand in the coming years.
The venture is funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (/ANR-26-CE54-6287) and supported by CaeSAR (Caen, Strategy for Accelerating Research);
It brings together specialists of the Victorian press from two research teams: Histoire-Territoires-Mémoires (HISTEME - UR7455) at Caen Normandie, and the Long Nineteenth-Century Network at Manchester Metropolitan University, A pilot website based on three distinct editions of Punch’s Pocket Book can be accessed here.
The project engages with research in four academic areas: 1) the knowledge of periodical supplements, (annuals, almanacs, and pocketbooks), with a particular interest for the concept of branding, 2) research on Victorian political and social history, 3) the study of nineteenth-century literature and graphic arts, and 4) innovation in digital methodologies, and an enhanced understanding of the relationship between digital praxis and periodical theory.
Its second phase is scheduled to unfold over a period of 42 months, starting in October 2026 and ending in March 2030. Throughout this period, a corpus of 36 pocket books will be scanned, transcribed, annotated and uploaded onto the proposed website by instalments of 3 to 9 volumes.
Events will be organised in relation with the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), involving students as well as postdoctoral researchers throughout the duration of the project.
The successful applicant will be expected to work in collaboration with the project coordinator and the team on the following aspects of the project: • collect, classify and analyse data from scanned pages (whole corpus).
• study the publication’s structure and contents (whole corpus) • conduct field research (material archives).
This task may imply one or several research trips in France and/or abroad.
• conduct research on corpus reception and circulation (study and transcription of extant users’ annotations/study of collections).
• contribute to text and image annotation (whole corpus) • single-author two articles or papers on Punch's Pocket Book: one halfway through the project, and the second on completion.
• contribute to collaborative publications (editorial responsibilities, blog posts) • contribute to the organization of research events (workshops, seminars, conferences) in Caen and the UK.