ABSTRACT
William Makepeace Thackeray’s commitment to periodical writing is one of the most distinctive aspects of his literary legacy. He wrote regularly for a variety of different publications, in Britain and abroad. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, the magazine that he was most committed to was Punch, contributing illustrations and satirical pieces of wit and humour from 1842 to 1854. 1 Through an analysis of the Punch contributor ledgers, currently part of a digitisation project at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), this essay goes beyond the more familiar satirical works of Thackeray such as The Snobs of England (1846–47), to examine the true range of his work for Punch. Using the relatively neglected Punch contributor ledgers, I consider how advancements in digital archiving can enhance author studies to reveal previously unstudied material. I move on to analyse wider debates about the benefits of digitisation and the implications that this may have for appreciating prolific, yet comparatively neglected, writers and artists like Thackeray. The final part of the chapter considers how the data returned from digital repositories can be sorted and displayed. By applying heuristics to the data on a known topic, within given parameters, researchers can go on to more readily formulate search patterns to discover previously undetected relationships in the data in order to reappraise their subject. As a starting point, a series of graphs will quantitatively represent patterns in Thackeray’s production for Punch, allowing for an examination of the length of his contributions and their place in the magazine for the first time. What this reveals is how much greater a role Thackeray played on the magazine’s staff than was previously conceived, which, in turn, contributed to the verbal visual character of Punch, for which it became renowned. 2 By opening up new avenues for research, this essay suggests a method for developing existing scholarship on Thackeray in order to ensure his work may continue to be preserved in time and memory.
