Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Marie Duval

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval 1847–1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century, focusing on new types of cultural work by women and establishing Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period. Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabella Tessier, 1847–90), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the nineteenth century.Duval's cartoons, strips and illustrations revolutionised print comedy. Her London characters became a mainstay of Judy magazine, a rival to Punch, and introduced its middle-class readers to a lower-class milieu – domestic servants who get the better of their masters, street urchins who terrorise the elderly, clowns who are miserably unfunny. The most famous character was Ally Sloper, a boozy ne-er do well, always in trouble with the police, the landlord, and his wife – developed by Duval into nothing less than a national hero.The book discusses key themes of Duval’s vision and production, relative to wider historic, social, cultural and economic environments. It identifies her as an exemplary radical practitioner, especially significant for importing ideas from the stage to the page, and for confounding gender expectations. She emerges as a key figure in the new congruence between performance, illustration, narrative drawing and novels.The book is a journey of rediscovery, sourced from an unprecedented range of primary sources and bringing together the fields of Comics Studies, Theatre Studies, Comedy Studies, Periodical Studies and Women's Studies. It aims to restore the maverick Duval to her rightful place in history. Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, 1847–1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century.It discusses key themes and practices of Duval’s vision and production, relative to the wider historic social, cultural and economic environments in which her work was made, distributed and read, identifing Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner.The book interrogates the relationships between the practices and the forms of print, story-telling, drawing and stage performance.It focuses on the creation of new types of cultural work by women and highlights the style of Duval’s drawings relative to both the visual conventions of theatre production and the significance of the visualisation of amateurism and vulgarity.Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist establishes Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century.