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Marie Duval Maverick Victorian Cartoonist
Nicolas Labarre
Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite. Marie Duval Maverick Victorian Cartoonist. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020.
272 pages, 80£.
ISBN : 978-1-5261-3355-7
Marie Duval’s (1848-1890), was a British illustrator, whose work in Judy, between 1869 and 1885, came to define Ally Slopper, “the first comics superstar” (Sabin 2003). This book is an essential addition to a growing constellation of academic works about Duval’s work and career. For a few years now, Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin and Julian Waite have been putting together resources and commentaries about Duval, demonstrating her position as pioneering Victorian Cartoonist, expanding on Sabin’s earlier seminal work on Ally Slopper. An extensive digital collection of her illustrations – freely available at
https://www.marieduval.org/ – serves as a cornerstone of the project, which also includes an exhibit, academic articles, a popular book (Marie Duval, Myriad Editions, 2018) and even a book-length drawn homage by Simon Grennan (Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval, Bookworks, 2018).
As its title indicates, Marie Duval, Maverick Victorian Cartoonist seeks to place Duval’s work in context, positioning her as “exemplary radical practitioner” (6) in a specific “historic, social, cultural and economic environment” (back-cover). This ambitious program is accomplished through a series of chapters, each signed by one of the authors, relating the salient characteristics of Duval’s practice as an illustrator to her social and professional environment. In particular, the book pays close attention to the various ways in which she integrated her experience on stage into her graphic work.
The first section, “Work”, examines Duval’s role at Judy (chapter 1), as a woman employee (chapter 2), as a theatre practitioner (chapter 3), as the authors of the whimsical Queens & Kings and Other Things children’s book (chapter 4) and in the context of the technologies of serial publishing (chapter 5). A second section, “Depicting and performing,” focuses more on her practice of drawing, calling attention to the significance of her style (chapter 6), to the relationship between performance and drawing (chapter 7), and to the role of spectacle in her output (chapter 8). Though nominally part of that section, the final chapter introduces a different angle, by examining the ambiguities of reading her as “a women’s cartoonist”. Two collective appendices examine the question of attribution and the issues related to terminology and historicization. Though self-contained, these chapters are not autonomous. The book’s value lies in its clear sense of
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progression, interlocking its various chapters into an increasingly complete structure. While I felt a short conclusion would have been useful, and would recommend reading the second appendix along with the introduction, and before the main body of the work, that structure is compelling.
One of the key qualities of ambitious historical works is their ability to sketch out an entire world out of a specific area of interest, gradually delineating the contours and the foundation of the milieu in which that specific area was located. Marie Duval, Maverick Victorian Cartoonist succeeds in accomplishing that task and reconstructs that “first age of leisure” (20), to the point where such Victorian idiosyncrasies as the black pudding pantomime figures (which was used on stage as part of allegories about hangovers) cease to appear as quaint oddities for modern readers, and come to make perfect sense in that re-established context. The focus of the book is not on the entire Victorian society of course, but on narrower social environment, centered on illustration, humor and performances of all kinds, but cutting across social classes and, to a lesser extent, across gender lines. While the book is in large part about comics, and includes many pages that can be read as such, it openly resists describing Duval as a “comics creator”, “a particular tradition […] she can only be said to tangentially belong” (248). Much like Christina Meyer’s recent study of the Yellow Kid (Producing Mass Entertainment. The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid, 2019), the book thus broaches phenomena that are crucial to understanding the history of comics, but avoids the teleological bias of
reading the late 19th
century context only as a precursor to later developments.
The most fascinating characteristic of the book is certainly the fact that this contextual apparatus is built around a mostly empty center. Thanks in large part to the authors’ previous work, Duval’s output is now fairly well-known and accessible – the online archive includes over 1,400 illustrations – but her life is not. What we know of her is literally based on her social environment, in the form of a few legal documents, reviews of her work on stage or in print, and of course the illustrations themselves.
Early in the book, Simon Grennan explains why the wood engraving technology used for Duval’s graphic works left no original other than the printed material itself. This offers an apt metaphor for the project at hand, with Duval herself as a long-lost original. In some cases, this makes the texts tentative, hesitant to draw conclusions from flimsy accounts and possible but unproved connections. That empty center is especially visible early on, and in these early passages, the book may appear somewhat speculative and inconclusive (“Whether Duval was policed at the magazine is not known, but we can assume that” [27]). However, the gradual broadening of the circle – from Judy to the meaning of “feminism” in Victorian society – and the accretion of contextual elements demonstrates that the lost original may not be necessary to our understanding after all. The book does establish what made Duval a “maverick”, but it resists any attempt to describe her as a genius, somehow removed from her historical circumstances.
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She was singular, but that singularity made sense within a variety of normative systems, in particular the “Judy system” (20) – itself a part of broader serial publishing apparatus (ch.5) – and the changing gender norms at humor magazines (ch.2 and 9).
The benefits of this careful examination of the tensions between norms and deviations are especially striking at the visual level. The 65 images included in the text build towards a gradual understanding of Duval’s work and of the system of resemblances and differences it established towards contemporary visual culture. The illustrations include not only Duval’s work, but also that of contemporaries, and on more than one occasion, the immediate context in which the image appeared, underlining the dialog between Duval and contemporary advertisement, for instance.
In a useful appendix, the authors describe the difficulty of “restoring the energy” of 19th
century jokes in order to “apprehend why people at the time might have thought it funny” (247). They conclude that their efforts to “rebuild the joke” are necessarily incomplete. This is certainly accurate, but it is no mean achievement for the book to have undertaken this rebuilding, and to have succeeded to such a large extent.
Sources
GRENNAN, Simon. 2018. Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval. Book Works.
GRENNAN, Simon, Roger SABIN, Julian WAITE, and Isabelle Émilie DE TESSIER. 2018. Marie Duval. Oxford, UK: Myriad Editions.
SABIN, Roger. 2003. “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?” Image [&] Narrative, no. 7 (October). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/rogersabin.htm.
Nicolas Labarre is Assistant Professor at University Bordeaux Montaigne (France) where he teaches US
society and culture, comics and video games. Email: nicolas.labarre@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
