Few magazines have captured the imagination of historians and literary critics as Punch has. From the summer of 1841, when Henry Mayhew, Mark Lemon, Stirling Coyne, and Ebeneezer Landells began the periodical, until it ended in 2002, the influence of this weekly was immeasurable. As Patrick Leary recently told an interviewer in answer to the question, why did he write this book, “It just so happened that Punch had such an interesting story and especially such a richness of manuscript materials associated with it … that I was just drawn to that story. It was a story that I really wanted to tell.” It is also a story you will want to read. In The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London, Leary not only demonstrates the ways in which oral culture and print culture work together, but he also narrates a compelling story of a diverse bunch of characters, from the quiet Punch diarist Henry Silver to the inimitable Charles Dickens (who never wrote a word for Punch but practically owned its publishers Bradbury and Evans for a time), in an electric setting—the publishing business of mid-Victorian London.

In The Punch Brotherhood, Leary “relates the notion of literary or authorial community to that of the production of print culture.” He does this in a way that “pays heed to the immaterial and evanescent, but nonetheless powerful, medium of oral culture, as well as to the specific materiality of print as a commodity within a larger system of production” (6). Leary builds on the previous work on oral culture by Walter Ong and others such as Robert Darnton, but instead of being concerned with “readers and readership,” he is concerned with the “magazine as a business enterprise and a working community” (6). Leary illustrates how oral culture functioned in the community that was the Punch editorial staff and how oral culture shaped the relationships of that community with the rest of the publishing world in London.

The first two chapters of this book offer a masterful remix of historical background material for the understanding of Punch—the history of the Wednesday night dinner meetings around the famous Punch table and the genesis of the “Large Cut” (the full-page political cartoon that was the focal point of each week’s magazine). These histories are offered through the voice of the diarist Henry Silver, who recorded the conversations of each Wednesday night dinner meeting from August 1858 until 1870. What they also explain is that the “Large Cut,” the pictorial essence of Punch, was not authored by “a single univocal agent” (37) but instead was born out of “an at times chaotic vocal collaboration in which suggestions whirled through the cigar smoke in thick profusion, shouted and whispered, lauded and discarded, contested, tinkered with, and at last—whittled down to one—approved” (37). Leary acknowledges that no text is talk, but absent electronic recordings, Silver’s diary offers an important glimpse into the conversations of the men behind Punch.

Next, Leary moves to an examination of the rules that governed the “two-way flow of information between private conversations and the organs of the press” (57). He notes that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, these rules were in some ways becoming more restrictive while simultaneously becoming more open to the curiosity of the public. These shifts in the unwritten rules of private talk affected Punch significantly. In some important ways, Punch succeeded because the editorial staff mostly excluded literary gossip from the magazine. Leary revisits the summer of 1858 and the events in the personal lives of Charles Dickens (who expected Punch to publish his letter explaining his separation from his wife) and William Makepeace Thackeray (who wanted no personal gossip in Punch) as the prime examples to consider the “boundaries between private and public life and the relationship between talk and print” (79).

The last two chapters of the book offer insights into the life of Shirley Brooks, editor of Punch from 1870 until his death in 1874, and the publishing company/printing firm of Bradbury and Evans that bought Punch in 1842. As one of London’s most prolific and versatile journalists, Brooks was most influential in the discussions of the “Large Cut” each week because he possessed knowledge of “the cut and thrust of parliamentary politics” that his colleagues often deferred to. Leary easily verifies that Brooks’s role in the Punch Brotherhood was as the conservative voice: “Punch did not grow more establishmentarian and more hostile to workingmen and Reform in the middle decades of Victoria’s reign because the magazine had grown up; it did so, in large part, because it had hired Shirley Brooks” (124). The story Leary tells of the connection between Bradbury and Evans and Punch is also one of talk. As businessmen, Bradbury and Evans “capitalized on sociability” (145). They maintained personal relationships with authors and publishers, and their own editorial staff structure was responsible for transferring the orality of the table to the printed word of the magazine.

The greatest strength of The Punch Brotherhood is in Leary’s magisterial use of primary sources. He uses not only letters, ledgers, and diaries, but he also transcribed Silver’s diary, and it anchors this study as the primary evidence of the “talk around the Table.” Another considerable strength of this book is in Leary’s ability to weave the story of Punch, the London literary world, and men like Lemon, Brooks, Dickens, and Thackeray into a novel-like narrative.

The knowledge on display and the storytelling ability of Leary make this book very easy to praise, but I was given pause by the numerous textual footnotes. Almost every page of the book has a footnote that is as compelling as the main text. I soon gave into the notes, but one wonders how a single narrative that incorporated much of what is in these would read. Nonetheless, scholars in many disciplines will find The Punch Brotherhood not only refreshing but necessary.