The Education of Henry Silver

Summary : Abstract—In this talk we will take a tour of the most remarkable document in the Punch Archive: Henry Silver’s “diary” of the talk at the Sunday dinner meetings of the staff and proprietors of Punch.  Almost everything we know about the week-to-week operation of the magazine at mid-century comes from this unassuming notebook with its torn, fading cover and its pages and pages of tiny scribbles.  Central to that operation was the sometimes vigorous debate about the theme and form of the vastly influential full-page political cartoon – the Big Cut – and we will explore the intimate and sometimes contentious connections between those discussions and the cartoons that eventually appeared.  But there is much more to Silver’s diary, for it represents one of the few sustained records of actual middle-class conversation that have come down to us from the period. And as for the self-effacing Henry Silver himself? Something of a mystery, as we’ll see, but one worth a closer look.

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