Researching Female Punch Writers in the Contributors Ledgers

Although the Curran Index (https://www.curranindex.org/) has now made attribution data for Punch’s nineteenth-century contributors available online, the original contributors ledgers in the Punch archive provide a wealth of additional information for researchers who are interested in Punch’s writers. As well as listing the authors of Punch’s written contributions and what they were paid, these ledgers often include addresses and other brief notes. In my research for my book on female Punch contributors between 1868 and 1918, I have found the ledgers an invaluable resource for uncovering biographical information as well as attribution data. In this paper I will explore what the ledgers can tell us about Punch’s authors and their networks through addresses, payment records, marginal notes, and misattributions. For example, the first few Punch contributions by the poets May Kendall and Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson) were initially wrongly attributed in the ledger to Andrew Lang, who submitted the work on their behalf, before the record was corrected in a later note. Incidents such as this give an insight into the social networks that helped women to begin contributing to Punch. I will give some examples of information I have uncovered from the ledgers as well as demonstrating how the basic details from the ledgers can be used as a jumping-off point for further biographical research into little-known authors using census returns and online family history resources.