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The Victorian Meme Machine: Remixing the Nineteenth-Century Archive
Bob Nicholson
History has not been kind to Victorian jokes. ile the great works of
nineteenth-century art and literature have been preserved and celebrated
by successive generations, even the period’s most popular gags have largely
been forgotten. In the popular imagination, the Victorians have long been
regarded as terminally humourless; a strait-laced society who, in the words
of their queen, were famously ‘not amused’.1 And yet, millions of jokes were
written during the nineteenth century. ey were printed in books and news-
papers, performed in theatres and music halls, and retold in pubs, oces,
taxicabs, schoolrooms, and kitchens throughout the land. Like many other
forms of ephemeral popular culture, the majority of these jokes were never
recorded and have now been lost. As a result, historians have tended to
focus on weightier and more enduring forms of Victorian comedy: the liter-
ary humour of Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, omas Hood, Douglas
Jerrold, and Oscar Wilde; the political satire of Punch; or the songs of the
late-Victorian music hall.2 is is important work, but it covers a small
fraction of the period’s comic output. If we want to understand the impor-
Unless otherwise stated, all hyperlinks in the body of the article were accessed on
5 October 2015.
1 It is possible that Victoria never actually uttered this phrase — its attribution has
been the subject of debate for more than a century. e Yale Book of Quotations (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) attributes it to her via an anecdote printed in
an American paper (p.789). On the other hand, Princess Alice claimed in a 1977
interview with the BBC that her grandmother had ‘never said it’. However, even if
it is apocryphal, the phrase has since become deeply embedded in popular under-
standing of the period. For more discussion of this, see Duncan Marks, ‘We ARE
Amused! e Comical Uses and Historical Abuses of Queen Victoria’s Infamous
Reproach’, in History and Humour: British and American Perspectives, ed. by Barbara
Korte and Doris Lechner (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013), pp.133–50.
2 For a sample of this scholarship, see e Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives, ed.
by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Roger B. Henkle, Comedy
and Culture: England 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Rich-
ard D. Altick, Punch: e Lively Youth of a British Institution 1841–1851 (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1996); and Patrick Leary, e Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and
Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London: British Library, 2010). For key texts
on Victorian music hall, see Music Hall: e Business of Pleasure, ed. by Peter Bailey
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986); Jacqueline S. Bratton, Music Hall:
Performance and Style (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986); Dagmar Kift, e
Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class, and Conict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: e Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular
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tance of humour within Victorian Britain, and to unpack the social, cultural,
and political work that it performed, then we need to nd a way to recover
some of these long-forgotten jokes and open them up to scholarly analysis.
is is a challenging proposition, but not an impossible one. Millions of
puns, gags, and comic sketches have been preserved — often by accident —
in archives of nineteenth-century print culture. Some appear in dedicated
joke books and comic periodicals, but most have survived as stowaways
in the margins of other texts. ey are scattered throughout thousands of
Victorian books, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. ile some were
organized into clearly demarcated collections, others were used more hap-
hazardly as column llers or sprinkled randomly among other titbits of
news and entertainment. Until recently, the only way to locate these scat-
tered fragments amidst the ‘vast terra incognita’ of Victorian print culture
was to identify a promising host text and then browse through it manually.3
e digitization of Victorian print culture has opened up new possibili-
ties for this kind of research. However, as this article argues, the structure
of these new archives continues to bury jokes among millions of pages of
other content. In order to make these, and other marginalized texts, more
visible, we need to rethink the organization of our digital collections and
open up their contents to creative forms of archival ‘remixing’.
In the summer of 2014, I began working with the British Library
Labs on a project that aims to nd Victorian jokes in their digital collections
and, for better or worse, bring them back to life. e Labs is an initiative
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aims to help research-
ers, developers, and artists access the British Library’s digital collections
and use them in creative new ways. ey run an annual competition that
invites people to pitch new ideas for projects that make use of the library’s
data sets. I was fortunate enough to win the competition in 2014, which
allowed me to work with the Labs team for six months.4 We began with
two key aims:
a) To build a high-quality, open access research database of
one million Victorian jokes. ese jokes would be extracted
from the library’s existing digital collections.
b) To share these jokes with modern audiences in creative new
ways, including the use of images, videos, performances,
and social media.
Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); and Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the
West End Stage, 1890–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
3 Patrick Leary, ‘Victorian Studies in the Digital Age’, in e Victorians since 1901:
Histories, Representations and Revisions, ed. by Miles Taylor and Michael Wol
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp.201–14 (p.206).
4 Bob Nicholson, ‘British Library Labs: Submitted Entry for 2014 Competition’,
<http://labs.bl.uk/e+Victorian+Meme+Machine> [accessed 4 October 2015].
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e project is still in its infancy. We have made steady progress over the last
year and have developed some rudimentary prototypes, but there is still a
long way to go before the archive will be ready to launch. At present, our
database contains 1500 jokes and has a basic search feature. As a result, this
article is a reection on work that is still in progress; it explains the ration-
ale behind the project and outlines the work that we have undertaken so
far. Part one explains why Victorian jokes are worthy of academic attention
and demonstrates how the most laboured of puns can reveal new insights
into nineteenth-century culture and society. Part two explores the relation-
ship between Victorian jokes and existing digital archives, and considers
the pros and cons of liberating them from the restrictions imposed by these
collections. Finally, part three documents the progress we have made so
far. In particular, it reects on the development of our ‘Victorian Meme
Machine’ tool. is piece of software takes textual jokes and automatically
pairs them with a random image drawn from the British Library’s digital
collections. ese ‘remixed’, visual versions of the jokes are designed to be
shared using modern social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. e process is kick-started by our ‘Mechanical Comedian’
tool, which uploads a random joke to Twitter every lunchtime, and it is
up to the public to decide whether a Victorian joke goes viral or slips once
again into obscurity.
The value of Victorian jokes
Before we discuss how Victorian jokes might be rescued from the enormous
condescension of posterity, it is important to consider why they are worth
saving. In order to do this, we need to unpack their relationship with three
dierent audiences: the Victorians who originally wrote, told, and con-
sumed the jokes; the historians who use them to explore Victorian culture
and society; and, nally, the modern-day artists and audiences who might
perform and consume them anew.
Firstly, it is important to address the ‘not amused’ myth head on. e
idea that the Victorian era was humourless, though long since challenged
by historians, remains in popular circulation and can sometimes underpin
the assumptions of even the best academic work in the eld. As recently
as 2006, for example, Vic Gatrell concluded his groundbreaking study
of sex and satire in Georgian London with the ‘watershed’ decade of the
1820s. After this, he argues, the bawdy, bodily humour and racy satire of
the Georgian period was silenced for a hundred and fty years by ‘respect-
able’, ‘squeamish’, ‘fastidious’, and ‘moralizing’ members of the ascend-
ant Victorian bourgeoisie.5 Changes in public manners and morality did
5 Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London:
Atlantic, 2006), p.19.
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indeed take place during the early decades of the nineteenth century, but
humour continued to occupy an important position within Victorian cul-
ture and society. e uninhibited ‘bum and fart’ jokes of Gatrell’s carica-
tures slipped (though never entirely) out of vogue, but they were replaced
by other forms of popular humour that circulated widely and performed
equally important cultural work.6
A comprehensive survey of these developments lies beyond the
scope of this article, but a few trends and landmarks are worth noting.
e pun — arguably the Victorians’ best-loved genre of joke — was theo-
rized as early as 1826 with the publication of C. M. Westmacott’s Punster’s
Pocket-Book.7 is volume contains comic essays and poems on the ‘art of
punning’, and includes an anthology of choice puns supposedly made
by well-known aristocrats, politicians, writers, and other public gures.
roughout these anecdotes, the demonstration of wit and a willingness to
crack a joke is celebrated as a positive character trait. For example, in the
introduction to one particular section, Westmacott salutes ‘the pleasant,
punning, conversational powers’ of a friend whose ‘whim, wit, and great
good nature [were] not more esteemed, than his unaected manners, and
sincerity of disposition justly entitle[d] him to’ (p.125). e pun, in other
words, was a signier of sociability and a key component in the ‘table talk’
of Victorian society. is was not a one-o publication, but an early exam-
ple of a comic genre that continued to ourish throughout the nineteenth
century. Anthologies of puns, jokes, and witty remarks made by famous
gures continued to be published during the period. Other notable examples
include the Railway Book of Fun (c. 1875), which instructed its readers that
‘cheerfulness [was] a Christian duty’ and a vital component of good men-
tal and physical health.8 Crucially, the gags in these collections were not
simply designed to be consumed in silence during a long railway journey;
they were read aloud to fellow passengers, retold to friends in the pub, and
creatively repurposed to suit new audiences. For example, a reviewer of a
joke book published in the 1860s concurred with its author that ‘“the most
tting place for [this] book [was] in the hands of the young gentleman
who has undertaken to amuse an assembled party” brought together […]
6 In her study of Victorian pornography, Lisa Sigel complicates Gatrell’s conclusions
by demonstrating that the body remained a source of humour in the nineteenth
century. See Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in
England, 1815–1914 (London: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
7 Bernard Blackmantle, e Punster’s Pocket-Book; or, e Art of Punning (London:
Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1826) <https://archive.org/details/punsterspocket
bo00westiala> [accessed 5 October 2015]. Westmacott published the book under
the pseudonym of Blackmantle, though modern reprints often use his real name.
8 Richard Brisk, e Railway Book of Fun (London: Nicholson, [n.d.]), p.5 <https://
archive.org/details/railwaybookoun00bris> [accessed 5 October 2015].
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for the purpose of spending a pleasant evening’.9 Sadly, we know little
about the oral second life of these jests, or indeed the jokes that were per-
formed each night by professional comedians in the country’s circus tents,
theatres, and music halls. Jacky Bratton and Ann Featherstone’s study of
the personal gag book of a Victorian clown provides a rare glimpse into this
ephemeral world and demonstrates the central role that joke-telling played
in the orchestration of circus entertainment.10
ese books and public performances are simply the tip of the ice-
berg. e popularity and signicance of jokes during the Victorian period
is best demonstrated by analysing their presence in the popular press. Jokes
began to appear sporadically in British newspapers as early as the 1830s.
A particularly interesting example comes from the Northern Liberator, a
short-lived mouthpiece of the Newcastle Chartists, which briey published
joke columns that had been imported from America.11 However, during
the second half of the nineteenth century, weekly columns of British and
American jokes became a core component of the so-called ‘new journal-
ism’. ey appeared across a wide range of publications, from mass-market
papers like Tit-Bits, to women’s domestic magazines, boys’ story papers,
and the back pages of hundreds of provincial weeklies. ese columns usu-
ally included between twenty and thirty jokes in each instalment and ran
for years at a time without interruption; over the course of a decade, a
single paper was capable of publishing more than ten thousand jests. It is
important to stress that editors usually clipped many of the jokes from pub-
lications such as Punch, and that we should therefore not expect to nd tens
of thousands of original gags in each provincial paper. Nevertheless, our
initial survey of the British Library’s digital newspaper holdings suggests
that hundreds of thousands of Victorian jokes are waiting to be uncovered.
is makes them the most promising source of material for our Victorian
jokes database, although extracting them from newspapers poses a series
of technical challenges that will be analysed in subsequent sections of this
article. For the purposes of our current discussion, the presence of jokes in
so many nineteenth-century periodicals acts as a nal rebuttal to the ‘not
amused’ myth. ey became a staple feature of the popular press at a time
when its editors were operating under growing commercial pressures and
were always searching for innovative new ways to attract and retain a mass
readership. Tit-Bits, one of the most successful and inuential players in
9 ‘Illustrated Gift-Books For e Young’, Morning Post, 5 December 1867, p.3. e
book under review was Hugh Rowley’s Puniana, which is discussed in more detail
in a subsequent section of this article.
10 Jacky Bratton and Ann Featherstone, e Victorian Clown (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
11 A column of American jokes appeared in the paper each week between 7 September
1839 and 26 October 1839 under the titles ‘ims of Jonathan’ and ‘Scraps from
the Far West’.
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this emerging market, consistently lled its front cover with jokes and scat-
tered them throughout its other pages as column llers. Similarly, Lloyd’s
Weekly News introduced a regular column of imported American jokes in
1896 — the same year that it became the rst newspaper in the country to
achieve a circulation of one million. Countless provincial papers adopted
similar strategies as they shifted their focus from news to entertainment. For
example, in 1883 the Hampshire Telegraph moved away from its traditional
focus on naval news and shipping intelligence, and sought to broaden its
readership through the introduction of a magazine-style supplement that
regularly included at least two lengthy joke columns. In short, it is clear
that jokes were a pervasive and popular aspect of Victorian culture and
that Victorian society was a good deal more amused than the old stereo-
type would tend to suggest. e fact that they valued jokes so highly and
produced them in such remarkable quantity is enough justication for his-
torians to take them seriously.
But what else do these jests oer to modern audiences? It is fair to
say that many of them have not aged well. Take the following examples
from Hugh Rowley’s Puniana (1867) — a 250-page book of puns that is
available to read on the Internet Archive:
at’s the dierence between a mouse and a young lady?
One wishes to harm the cheese, the other to charm the he’s.12
y, when a very fat man gets squeezed coming out of the
opera, does it make him complimentary to the ladies?
Because the pressure makes him atter. (p.166)
If you were going to kill a conversational goose (how many of
them do we not know!) what vegetable would she allude to?
Ah!-spare-a-goose! (p.214)
y is Lord Overstone like a Britannia-metal teapot?
Because he’s a-Lloyd with lots of tin! (p.157)
Perhaps surprisingly, these jokes were popular enough with Victorian
readers to inspire a sequel, More Puniana, in 1875.13 Modern audiences
will probably be less enthusiastic. Some of the puns are still intelligible and
might produce the odd smile, but others have become detached from the
social, cultural, and political contexts that once underpinned their humour.
e joke about Lord Overstone, for example, requires us to be aware that he
12 Hugh Rowley, Puniana; or, oughts Wise, and Other-Wise (London: Hotten, 1867),
p.163 <https://archive.org/details/puniana00rowlgoog> [accessed 5 October 2015].
13 More Puniana; or, oughts Wise and Other-y’s, ed. by Hugh Rowley (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1875) <https://archive.org/details/morepuniana00rowlgoog>
[accessed 5 October 2015].
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was a banker (‘lots of tin’, i.e. money) with the surname Lloyd, and also
to pick up on the fact that Britannia-metal teapots were alloyed (‘a-Lloyd’)
with tin. In 1867, Rowley evidently expected his readers to possess this
contextual knowledge to be able to recognize these seemingly obscure ref-
erence points and decode them quickly. A century and a half later, most
readers will need to conduct background research in order to ‘get’ the joke.
But the very thing that kills such jokes for present-day audiences
makes them all the more fascinating to historians. As Jan Bremmer and
Herman Roodenburg argue, humour can oer a powerful ‘key to the cul-
tural codes and sensibilities of the past’.14 Jokes, in particular, often work by
subverting or recognizing the pre-existing expectations of their audience;
they nd humour by playing with an idea, person, situation, or piece of
information which an audience, in a particular time and place, is expected
to recognize. As a result, even the briefest of one-liners are often encoded
with the attitudes, knowledge, and experiences of their intended audiences.
By decoding a joke’s reference points and unpacking the dynamics of its
humour, historians can begin to access the minds of its readers in new ways.
Historians of the early modern period have already begun to use the period’s
jestbooks and popular prints to shed new light on the everyday workings of
a historically distant society.15 In particular, Gatrell has demonstrated how
a study of eighteenth-century popular humour ‘can take us to the heart of
a generation’s shifting attitudes, sensibilities and anxieties’ (p.5). In par-
ticular, these sources allowed Gatrell to challenge dominant conceptions of
the late-Georgian period as an age of politeness. e humour of the period
and the way it was consumed, he argues, oers compelling evidence for an
extensive metropolitan culture of impoliteness. In other words, the study
of jokes and other forms of popular humour allowed him to say new and
important things about the social and cultural values of an age; it is, he
rightly argues, ‘as plausibly a historian’s subject as any other’ (Gatrell, p.5).
at happens when we subject Victorian jokes to similar forms of
in-depth analysis? e gag about Lord Overstone seems unpromising at
rst glance, but it reveals something about the banker’s fame and the per-
vasive nature of nancial institutions in Victorian society. Readers of the
joke were expected to know his name, his profession, and wealth, and to
recognize him as a plausible reference point for jokes about money. Of
course, we should not place too much interpretive weight on a single joke
published in a relatively obscure book. But a wider search of books and
newspapers reveals a broader trend. A near-identical joke was reportedly
14 A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. by Jan Bremmer
and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p.xi.
15 Simon Dickie, ‘Hilarity and Pitilessness in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: English
Jestbook Humour’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2003), 1–22; and Ian Munro,
‘A woman’s answer is neuer to seke’: Early Modern Jestbooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
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told by the writer Shirley Brooks at a dinner of Punch contributors in
March 1859 (apparently ackeray laughed ‘heartily’), and appeared in
numerous newspapers throughout the country.16 Most of them reprinted it
word for word, though the London correspondent of the Belfast News-Letter
decided to help his readers decipher the punchline by adding Overstone’s
surname and explaining the ‘alloy/a-Lloyd’ pun.17 In 1863, it surfaced again
in the Sherborne Mercury and an anthology of Riddles and Jokes compiled
by the editor of Every Boy’s Magazine.18 Rowley’s retelling of the joke was
published in Puniana in 1867, which might then have inspired a reprint in
the Bedfordshire Times and Independent.19 It was revived again three years
later by Judy magazine and reprinted in several other newspapers, includ-
ing the popular Lloyd’s Weekly.20 As I have argued elsewhere, the reprinting
of jokes often transcended national boundaries, and this case study was no
exception.21 By the end of 1870, the joke about Overstone had reached the
Huron Expositor (Ontario, Canada) and the Hamilton Spectator (Hamilton,
Australia).22 In 1885, two years after Overstone’s death, it was still circu-
lating in the ‘Conundrums’ column of the Australian Town and Country
Journal.23 In other words, it appears that Lord Overstone remained a topi-
cal reference point for more than a decade, and one that was not just famil-
iar to London’s literary and political circles but to the large working-class
audience of Lloyd’s Weekly, along with readers in Lancaster, Portsmouth,
Belfast, Cardi, Canada, and Australia.
16 M. H. Spielmann, e History of Punch (London: Cassell, 1895), p.69; ‘FACETIÆ’,
North Wales Chronicle, 2 April 1859, p.3; ‘Wit and Humour’, Hampshire Advertiser,
2 April 1859, p.3; ‘Random Readings’, Family Herald, 16 (2 April 1859), p. 784; ‘Odd
Bits’, Leeds Times, 9 April 1859, p. 3; ‘SCRAPS’, Manchester Times, 16 April 1859,
p.3; ‘Varieties’, Cheshire Observer, 16 April 1859, p.8; ‘Varieties’, Leeds Intelligencer, 30
April 1859, p.3; ‘Varieties’, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 7 May 1859, p.3; [untitled],
Westmorland Gazette, 7 May 1859, p. 4; ‘Literature, Science, and Art’, Berkshire
Chronicle, 7 May 1859, p.7; and ‘Varieties’, Hereford Times, 21 May 1859, p.6.
17 ‘London Correspondence’, Belfast News-Letter, 26 April 1859, p.3.
18 ‘Our Christmas Riddles’, Sherborne Mercury, 22 December 1863, p.4; Riddles and
Jokes Collected by the Editor of Every Boy’s Magazine (London: Routledge, Warne, and
Routledge, 1863), p.43.
19 ‘Our Arm Chair’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 17 August 1867, p.2.
20 ‘Extracts from the Comic Papers’, Belfast News-Letter, 28 May 1870, p.4; ‘Extracts
from the Comic Papers’, Lancaster Gazette, 28 May 1870, p.2; ‘Cuttings from the
Comic Journals’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 29 May 1870, p.2; ‘Wit and Humour’,
Cardi and Merthyr Guardian, 4 June 1870, p.3; and ‘Varieties’, Jackson’s Oxford
Journal, 18 June 1870, p.6.
21 Bob Nicholson, ‘“You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!”: Jokes and the Culture
of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (2012),
273–86.
22 ‘Varieties’, Huron Expositor, 9 September 1870, p. 1; and ‘Two Charming Little
Experiments’, Hamilton Spectator, 20 August 1870, p.5.
23 ‘Conundrums’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 3 January 1885, p.31.
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is is just one small example. ere are thousands — possibly even
millions — of other Victorian jokes waiting to be discovered and unpacked.
Tracing their recurring themes, tropes, and reference points promises to
reveal valuable new insights into nineteenth-century culture and soci-
ety. By examining the things that made ordinary Victorians laugh, we
can explore the shared beliefs and practices that underpinned a range of
social, cultural, political, and economic relations. A typical newspaper’s
joke column might shed light on: the gender relations in Victorian mar-
riages; public perceptions of tramps and lawyers; discourses of race and
class; the perceived shortcomings of the French; the cultural signicance
of local dialects; and a range of other characters, situations, and attitudes
that millions of readers were expected to recognize in order to ‘get’ the
joke. Crucially, jokes help to reconstruct the attitudes and experiences of
communities who are often under-represented in the historical record. For
example, I initially became interested in newspaper jokes when using them
as a way to challenge prevailing academic assumptions about Victorian
attitudes to America, which tend to be over-reliant on the work of middle-
class travel writers.24 Finally, the periodicity of newspapers allows us to see
how ideas and practices captured in these jokes changed over time. How,
we might wonder, did Victorian joke writers respond to changes in gender
relations and the emergence of the women’s surage movement? How did
jokes about Charles Darwin and his scientic theories develop over the
course of the century? And what do jokes tell us about the racial theories
that underpinned Britain’s imperial activities? In short, there is much to
be gained from unearthing these forgotten fragments of Victorian humour
and subjecting them to sustained historical analysis.
Remixing the archive
Finding and exploring Victorian jokes poses a number of practical and
methodological challenges. If researchers want to read a random sample
of the period’s humour, then it is fairly straightforward to access dedicated
joke books such as e London Budget of Wit (1817), English Jests and Anecdotes
(1880), e American Joe Miller (1865), or Rowley’s Puniana (1867).25 But,
as we have seen, these dedicated anthologies represent just a fraction of
the surviving record of nineteenth-century jests; many more were scattered
24 Bob Nicholson, ‘Jonathan’s Jokes: American Humour in the Late-Victorian Press’,
Media History, 18 (2012), 33–49; and Bob Nicholson, ‘Looming Large: America and
the Late-Victorian Press, 1865–1901’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of
Manchester, 2012).
25 e London Budget of Wit; or, A ousand Notable Jests (London: Walker and
Edwards, 1817) <https://archive.org/details/londonbudgetwit00mirtgoog>;
English Jests and Anecdotes Collected from Various Sources (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1880)
<https://archive.org/details/englishjestsanec00edin>; and e American Joe Miller:
A Collection of Yankee Wit and Humour, comp. by Robert Kempt, 2nd edn (London:
Adams and Francis, 1865) <https://archive.org/details/americanjoemill00kempgoog>
[all accessed 5 October 2015].
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throughout newspapers and magazines. Finding these jokes is more prob-
lematic. Until relatively recently, historians would have had little choice
but to leaf through millions of pages of print in search of anything with a
punchline, and locating a joke on a specic topic would have been simply
impracticable. Fortunately, the digitization of nineteenth-century books
and newspapers has disrupted conventional ‘top-down’ approaches to
browsing the archive and opened up the possibility of ‘bottom-up’ key-
word searching for specic words and phrases.26 Under the old system of
manual browsing, it would have taken years of reading (and a few long-haul
ights to Canada and Australia) to track down reprints of the Overstone
joke. Now, we can simply enter a phrase from the joke (i.e. ‘why is Lord
Overstone’) into a series of online archives and analyse the results.27 It is
important to remember that these digital searches are by no means com-
prehensive. Most nineteenth-century print culture remains un-digitized,
and existing archives are undermined by the variable quality of their OCR
data.28 It is likely that the Overstone joke appeared in several other publi-
cations; in particular, I suspect that it was published in a prominent news-
paper or magazine in 1859 before suddenly ‘going viral’ throughout the
provincial press. Nevertheless, despite these blind spots, it is clear that
keyword searching represents a huge step forward for this kind of cultural
analysis.
However, the methodology used to trace the Overstone joke has
undeniable limitations. I was only able to locate its reprints because I had
26 For a discussion of these ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to reading news-
papers, see Bob Nicholson, ‘e Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Pos-
sibilities of Digital Newspaper Archives’, Media History, 19 (2013), 59–73.
27 In this instance, I used:
a) Gale Cengage’s subscription-based NewsVault platform to search across
multiple archives of British newspapers and periodicals.
b) ProQuest’s subscription-based British Periodicals to search for the joke in
weightier periodicals.
c) D. C. omson’s subscription-based British Newspaper Archive to search a
wider range of local newspapers.
d) e newspaper search engine Elephind to search a range of archives in
Australia and North America.
e) e Internet Archive and HathiTrust to nd mentions of the joke in books.
f) A simple Google search to try and mop up any other hits — this also searches
the Internet Archive and Google’s own archive of historic newspapers.
All the above websites accessed 5 October 2015.
28 Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz, and Pich Hemy Ros, ‘Measuring Mass Text Digitization
Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the
British Library’s 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive’, D-Lib Magazine, 15.7/8
(July/August 2009) <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html>
[accessed 5 October 2015].
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Rowley’s version of the joke. I selected a relatively distinctive string of
words from the text (‘why is Lord Overstone’) and used this to focus my
search. But imagine if we did not have this starting point and wanted to
nd out if any jokes were written about Overstone during the nineteenth
century. ere would we begin? A full-text search for ‘Overstone’ in the
19th Century British Library Newspapers database returns 6892 results — the
vast majority of which are not jokes. In information retrieval theory, the rel-
evance of a search is measured by its ‘precision’ and ‘recall’, and the preci-
sion of a search is determined by the percentage of results that are relevant
to the task in hand. In this case, we could try to improve the precision by
limiting it to articles with title words such as ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘jokes’, ‘jests’,
‘comic’, ‘varieties’, and ‘scraps’, but these searches bypass many relevant
sources (jokes were often published as untitled column llers), and still
require researchers to have a clear search term in mind. Imagine if we were
not interested in Overstone himself, but in jokes about Victorian bankers —
we might have selected search terms like ‘bank’, ‘banker’, ‘banking’, or
‘money’, but these would not have located the joke about Overstone.
In information retrieval theory, these searches may be better in terms of
their precision, but they are worse at ‘recall’ — this refers to the fraction
of relevant results that are retrieved by the search. In this case, overly pre-
cise searches run the risk of missing lots of relevant results. is balance
between precision and recall is a problem when attempting to retrieve any
kind of joke from existing newspaper databases. Imagine, for instance, that
we wanted to nd Victorian jokes about politics, literature, sport, or mar-
riage. How many potential searches would we need in order to locate all
of the gags on such broad topics? How would we disentangle jokes about
cricket from a newspaper’s sporting columns, or jokes about divorce from
its courtroom coverage? Even if we could focus purely on humour col-
umns, how would we pick out jokes about marriage from the thousands
of gags that feature words like ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ but are actually about
something else?
With time and perseverance we might have limited success, but we
would be forced to ‘go against the grain’ of an archive that was (under-
standably) never designed to support this kind of specic research. at
is more, we would need to conduct our research across a range of dierent
archives, each with their own search interfaces, organizational systems, and
technical idiosyncrasies. Only the most enthusiastic joke-hunters are likely
to persevere in such circumstances. In short, if we really want to unlock the
potential of Victorian jokes and subject them to in-depth historical analy-
sis, then we need to nd a way to make them more accessible.
ere are ways that this might be achieved using existing archives.
e British Newspaper Archive (BNA) allows users to ‘tag’ articles with
descriptive keywords, which would potentially allow us to curate a virtual
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sub-collection of joke columns. is archive also allows users to correct
errors in the OCR text, which would improve the quality of the collec-
tion and the discoverability of its jokes. However, it would require us to
operate within the connes of a single archive — one that requires users to
pay a subscription — and to ignore other important sources. Moreover, the
structure of this database means that we could only organize our collection
by column, rather than by individual jokes. is means that we could not
tag individual gags with their genre, subject, author, or country of origin.
As a result, the discovery of jokes would still be dependent on speculative
keyword searches. Consider the following example:
A USEFUL PRESENT
— Mrs. Henry Peck (whose mother has been visiting them for
over four months): ‘I don’t know what to buy mother for a
Christmas present. Do you?’
— Mr. Henry Peck: ‘Yes! Buy her a travelling bag!’29
is is a standard mother-in-law joke, but the term ‘mother-in-law’ is never
used. As a result, a keyword search for the phrase ‘mother-in-law’ will not
nd the joke. We might broaden our search to the word ‘mother’, but this
will return thousands of jokes that are not specically about mothers-in-law
and will still ignore gags which use words like ‘mama’ instead of ‘mother’.
Moreover, users would have no way to focus their research on a particular
form of humour (e.g. puns, conversational jokes, comic songs, funny de-
nitions, etc.). In short, working within the connes of an existing archive
like the BNA would not allow us to catalogue jokes using our own catego-
ries of metadata — the most we could hope to do is highlight the presence of
jokes in specic articles, and then leave researchers to do the rest. In other
words, this would be a small and rather compromised step forward.
e alternative is to build a new archive dedicated to Victorian
jokes. is might seem like a mammoth undertaking; anybody who has
been involved in a digitization project will attest to how complicated and
expensive these endeavours can be. In a time of shrinking budgets, I doubt
that any funding bodies will be anxious to spend millions of pounds on
a database of laboured Victorian puns. However, thousands of Victorian
jokes have already been digitized — we simply need to nd a way to extract
them from existing databases. en, we could recompile them into a new
data set designed to meet the specic requirements of historical research.
is would allow us to create a more focused research environment and to
catalogue jokes according to genre, subject, author, date, characters, place
of publication, or any other categories that scholars deem useful. e prac-
tical benets of this approach are clear. But this process of combing and
29 ‘American Jokes’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 5 January 1896, p.8.
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remixing elements of existing digital collections has other advantages too.
Firstly, it encourages us to disrupt the articial boundaries created by long-
established archives and to recognize the rich, intertextual connections that
existed within Victorian culture. For example, we currently tend to divide
the period’s books, newspapers, and periodicals into separate archival and
disciplinary silos; each of them are held in dedicated digital collections and
are often studied by unconnected communities of scholars. And yet, when
these texts were originally published, they sat side by side in nineteenth-
century bookshops and reading rooms. Victorian readers moved eortlessly
across the genre boundaries that now dene our archives and shape the
contours of research. Moreover, as the Overstone joke demonstrates, texts
and ideas were equally mobile; they leapt from newspapers to books, then
to the dinner table and back again with an agility that historians struggle
to match. An archive dedicated to Victorian jokes would help to facilitate a
more interdisciplinary and intertextual approach to the period.
Of course, the creation of an archive dedicated to jokes would estab-
lish a new and equally problematic set of structures, boundaries, and
perspectives. In particular, by extracting jokes and isolating them we dis-
connect them from the contexts in which they were originally read and
published. Can we really understand how the readers of Lloyd’s Weekly
deciphered the Overstone joke without also considering how he was
represented within the paper’s political coverage? Similarly, by treating
newspaper gags as self-contained textual units, we might lose sight of how
multi-joke columns were compiled, presented, and consumed. Readers
of Lloyd’s would have encountered fteen other jokes in that week’s col-
umn of ‘Cuttings from the Comic Journals’ before reaching the one about
Overstone — what role did these gags play in shaping readers’ responses to
our joke? Moreover, might these readers have approached the Overstone
joke in a dierent frame of mind when it was printed in a column entitled
‘Riddles’ rather than ‘Comic Cuts’?
In truth, the isolation of information is already a problem with cur-
rent digital archives. Historians are becoming increasingly blasé about
decontextualized reading; search engines allow us to jump instantly to a
word and sentence within an article without examining the material that
surrounds it. ese ‘keyword blinkers’ are a problem — one that a new joke
archive might exacerbate.30 As a result, it seems that we are caught between
two extremes. If we continue to work within existing archives, then we
must labour under the weight of an almost suocating amount of context,
an overwhelming sea of information that obscures our sources and masks
the connections that existed between dierent forms of print. On the other
hand, by extracting jokes from their original sources and presenting them
30 Nicholson, ‘e Digital Turn’, p.61. See also Adrian Bingham, ‘e Digitization
of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians’, Twentieth
Century British History, 21 (2010), 225–31 (pp.229–30).
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in a decontextualized fashion, we undermine our ability to understand
their historical workings and signicance. Fortunately, there is a middle
ground to be found. A dedicated archive would display the essential con-
textual information for each joke (original publication title, column title,
date, page number, etc.), and therefore allow researchers to replace a gag
within its original context.
For an existing example of this approach, consider the impressive
Reading Experience Database (RED). is archive contains evidence of his-
torical ‘reading experiences’ extracted from a broad range of sources. Here,
for example, are the results of a search for sources that mention readers
of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. ey include material from Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor (1861); an article from e Times (1845);
M. V. Hughes’s autobiographical account of A London Family: 1870–1900
(published 1946); and evidence from Jonathan Rose’s Intellectual Life of
the British Working Classes (2001). Each of these sources would normally be
organized into separate archives and libraries, but the RED database brings
them together in a new way. Crucially, it does not contain these sources in
full, but provides short extracts that relate to the reading of Lloyd’s Weekly.
For example, the entry from Hughes’s memoir simply reads: ‘How horri-
ed my father was on discovering that the servants had been reading little
bits to me out of “Lloyd’s Weekly” [on a Sunday].’31 is extract is sup-
ported by a remarkable amount of metadata. We are presented with infor-
mation about the reader/listener of the newspaper, including her name,
age, gender, nationality, and socio-economic class. We are also informed
about the title, genre, and provenance of the text being read, along with
details on the place and context in which it was read. is rich metadata
allows users to construct sophisticated searches that move beyond the use
of keywords. For example, we can immediately identify all entries in the
database that feature adult female servants reading newspapers. is kind
of search could not be accomplished using keywords alone. Crucially, each
entry in the RED database also contains full bibliographical details for the
original source, which makes it easy for researchers to reunite extracts with
their original context. A dedicated Victorian jokes database would work
in a similar way. Each joke would have a rich set of descriptive metadata,
including all of the contextual information required to connect the joke
with its original place of publication. Ideally, we would make this process
easier by including a copy of, or direct link to, the original source — though
the viability of this feature would depend on a range of legal and technical
considerations.
31 M. V. Hughes, A London Family: 1870–1900 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1946), p. 73 <http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.
php?id=906> [accessed 5 October 2015].
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Finally, a dedicated Victorian jokes database — or indeed any similar
digital project — should be built around the principles of open access.32
is would pose the perennial problems of funding and sustainability, but
the cost of running a project like this should not be too onerous — after all,
it is unlikely to receive millions of visitors. An open approach has two key
advantages. Firstly, it ensures that researchers and members of the public
will be able to access the collection without paying a subscription. As we
will see in the next section, the participation of volunteers will be vital to
the success of the project. Secondly, the creation of an open and carefully
curated data set will enable researchers to develop their own approaches
to the archive. For example, scholars could download the data set and use
other pieces of software to map the circulation of jokes using GIS; track the
rise and fall of words and phrases using tools like Google’s ngram viewer;
quantify the changing popularity of particular joke genres, subjects, and
characters; search for reprinted jokes using plagiarism detection tools;
or unpack linguistic patterns using corpus analysis software. e award-
winning Old Bailey Online project has already demonstrated the value of
opening archives up to these acts of ‘remixing’. In its original format,
the project allowed users to browse and search trial records using a fairly
conventional archival interface. However, the data set has now been used
for a variety of other projects. For example, Locating London’s Past allows
users to search Old Bailey Online and map their results onto a historical
map of London. Similarly, the Data Mining with Criminal Intent project has
developed a system for exporting the archive’s trial records to Voyant Tools —
a suite of free, online text analysis software that allows users to produce
word clouds, concordances, and other visualizations. ese tools allow
us to ‘distant read’ thousands of historical trial records and discover
new underlying themes and patterns in ways that were not possible using
the basic search interface. Finally, Old Bailey Online is also searchable via
the Connected Histories platform. is oers a new way to access the archive,
one that helps researchers to trace references to people and places across
a range of other archives and databases. All of this was made possible by
the openness of Old Bailey Online and the ease with which users can access,
download, and repurpose its data.
32 For reections on the challenges and benets of open access, see Peter Suber,
Open Access (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) <http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/
default/files/titles/content/9780262517638_Open_Access_PDF_Version.pdf>
[accessed 5 October 2015]; Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts,
Controversies and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) <http://
dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012>; Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); M. H. Beals, ‘Rapunzel and
the Ivory Tower: How Open Access Will Save the Humanities (from emselves)’,
Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2013), 543–50.
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Unfortunately, not all digitization projects have matched the gold
standard set by Old Bailey Online. A lack of public funding — and, in some
cases, a lack of imagination — has led to the creation of archives that are
encumbered by paywalls and complex copyright restrictions, or structured
in ways that makes data dicult to extract and reuse. Victorian newspa-
pers and periodicals have been digitized in a particularly restrictive and
commercially minded fashion, especially when compared to the openness
of similar archives in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Wales, and
Europe.33 But it is not too late to begin liberating them. Recent changes in
British copyright law have reinforced our right to directly access data sets
from commercial archives and explore them using our own digital tools.34
e Distant Reading Early Modernity (DREaM) project provides a recent
example of how old data sets are now being used in this fashion. is
endeavour centres on the creation of a corpus of 44,000 early modern texts
using data from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) database.
As they put it:
Unlike EEBO, DREaM will enable mass downloading of cus-
tom-dened subsets rather than obliging users to download
individual texts one-by-one. In other words, we have designed
it to function at the level of ‘sets of texts,’ rather than ‘individ-
ual texts.’ Examples of subsets one might potentially generate
include ‘all texts by Ben Jonson,’ ‘all texts published in 1623,’
or ‘all texts printed by John Wolfe.’ […] e ability to gener-
ate custom-dened subsets is important because it will allow
researchers to interrogate the early modern canon with distant
reading tools such as David Newman’s Topic Modeling Tool
or the suite of visualization tools available on Voyant-tools.
org. By paving the way for these possibilities, DREaM will sig-
nicantly expand the range and sophistication of technologies
33 For open access newspaper archives see:
a) United States: Chronicling America.
b) Australia: Trove.
c) New Zealand: Papers Past.
d) Wales: Welsh Newspapers Online.
e) Europe: Europeana Newspapers. is collection is also accessible through the
main Europeana portal.
f) A fairly comprehensive list of online newspapers is also maintained on
Wikipedia: see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_
newspaper_archives>.
All the above archives were accessed 5 October 2015.
34 ‘Exceptions to Copyright: Research’ (Newport: Intellectual Property Oce, 2014)
<https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright> [accessed 6 October 2015].
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currently available to researchers who wish to gain a broad
sense of printed matter in the period.35
is is a good example of how a long-established archive can be remixed in
ways that encourage new forms of research. An open data set of Victorian
jokes, extracted from a range of existing digital archives, would open up
similarly new methodological possibilities. All we need to do now is work
out how to build it.
The Victorian Meme Machine
e extraction of jokes from existing digital archives turns out to be a com-
plex process. Each archive and source type requires a dierent approach.
As a starting point, the British Library Labs team and I decided to focus
our attention on two of the Library’s digital collections: the 19th Century
British Library Newspapers database, and a collection of nineteenth-century
books digitized by Microsoft in 2008.
ile it is possible to nd jokes elsewhere, these sources provide the
largest concentrations of material. Dedicated joke books, such as Puniana,
contain hundreds of jokes in a single package. ese are the easiest texts to
process, because their jokes are not mixed in with other material and the
quality of their OCR data is usually good. For the pilot stage of the project,
one volunteer, Wendy Durham, copied 728 jokes from the OCR transcrip-
tion of the Book of Humour, Wit and Wisdom (1880) and pasted them into an
Excel spreadsheet that could be imported into our database. In the full-
ness of time it will be necessary to automate this process, but a manual
approach gave us a quick and useful sample of jokes to develop.
Working with the newspaper archive is more complex. Some news-
papers mixed humour with other pieces of entertaining miscellany under
titles such as ‘Varieties’ or ‘Our Carpet Bag’. e same is true of books,
which often combined jokes with short stories, comic songs, and material
for parlour games. ile it is easy to nd these collections, recognizing
jokes is more problematic. As our project develops, we intend to experi-
ment with natural language processing to build a joke-detection tool that
can pick out new content with similar formatting and linguistic characteris-
tics to jokes that we have already found. For example, conversational jokes
usually have capitalized names (or pronouns) followed by a colon and, in
some cases, include a descriptive phrase enclosed in brackets. So, if a text
includes strings of characters like ‘Jack (…):’ or ‘She (…):’ then there is a
good chance that it might be a joke. Similarly, many jokes begin with a
35 Stephen Wittek, ‘Introducing DREaM’, Early Modern Conversations <http://
earlymodernconversions.com/introducing-dream/> [accessed 5 October 2015].
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capitalized title followed by a full stop and a hyphen, and end with an itali-
cized attribution. Here is a characteristic example of all three types (Fig. 1):
Fig. 1: A typical Victorian newspaper joke. ‘Jokes of the Day’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper,
5 April 1891, p.7.
Unfortunately, conventional search interfaces are not designed to recognize
nuances in punctuation, so we will need to build something new ourselves.
However, for the pilot stage of the project, we chose to focus our eorts on
harvesting the ‘low-hanging fruit’ found in clearly dened joke columns.
In order to locate these columns we have compiled a continually
expanding list of search terms. Obvious keywords like ‘jokes’ and ‘jests’
are most eective, but we have also found material using other words like
‘quips’, ‘cranks’, ‘wit’, ‘fun’, ‘jingles’, ‘humour’, ‘laugh’, ‘comic’, ‘snaps’,
and ‘siftings’. Yet while these general search terms are useful, they do
not catch everything. Consider these peculiarly named columns from the
Hampshire Telegraph (Fig. 2). At rst glance, they look like food recipes, but
in point of fact they are columns of imported American jokes named after
a popular Yankee delicacy. Uncovering material like this is more labori-
ous and requires manual searches for peculiarly named books and joke
columns.
In the case of newspapers, this approach requires some educated
guesswork. Most joke columns appeared in popular weekly papers, or in
the weekend editions of mass-market dailies. Similarly, while the placement
of jokes varied from paper to paper (and sometimes from issue to issue),
they were typically located at the back of the paper alongside children’s col-
umns, fashion advice, recipes, and other miscellaneous titbits of entertain-
ment. Finally, once a newspaper has been found to contain one set of joke
columns, it is likely that more will be found under other names. For exam-
ple, the Newcastle Weekly Courant discontinued its long-running ‘American
Humour’ column in 1888 and renamed it ‘Yankee Snacks’. Tracking a single
change of identity like this is fairly straightforward; once the new title has
been identied we simply add it to our list of search terms. Unfortunately,
the editorial whims of some newspapers are harder to follow. For example,
the Hampshire Telegraph often scattered multiple joke columns throughout
a single issue. To make things more complicated, they tended to rename
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and reposition these columns every two weeks. Here is a sample of the
paper’s American humour columns, all drawn from the rst six months
of 1892 (Fig. 3). For papers like this, the only option at the moment is to
manually locate joke columns one at a time. In other words, while our
initial set of keywords should enable us to nd and extract thousands
of joke columns relatively quickly, more nuanced (and more laborious)
methods will be required to get the rest.
Using a range of keywords and manual browsing methods we soon
managed to identify the locations of at least one hundred thousand news-
paper jokes. In truth, this was always going to be the easy task. e real
Fig. 2: Columns of American humour published in the Hampshire Telegraph,
14 February 1891 to 4 April 1891.
Fig. 3: Columns of American humour published in the Hampshire Telegraph in 1892.
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challenge lies in extracting these jokes from their archives, importing them
into our database, and then converting them into a format that can be
searched by researchers and broadcast over social media. On the plus side,
the underlying structure of the 19th Century British Library Newspapers data-
base is fairly well suited to our purposes. Newspaper pages have already
been broken up into individual articles and columns. As a result, it should
theoretically be possible to isolate every article with the title ‘Jokes of the
Day’ and then extract them from the rest of the database. en I sug-
gested this project to the BL Labs, I naively thought we could perform
these extractions in a matter of minutes — unfortunately it is not that
easy. e archive’s public-facing platform is owned and operated by the
commercial publisher Gale Cengage, who sell subscriptions to universi-
ties and libraries around the world (UK universities currently get free
access via JISC). Consequently, access to the archive’s underlying content
is restricted when using this interface. It does not provide access to the
underlying data set, and images can only be downloaded one by one using
a web browser’s ‘save image as’ button. In other words, we cannot use the
commercial interface to instantly grab the les for every article with the
phrase ‘Jokes of the Day’ in its title. e British Library keeps its own copy
of these les, but when our project began they were stored in a format that
was dicult to access and extremely cumbersome to search. In order to
move forward with the automatic extraction of jokes we needed to secure
access to this data, transfer it onto a more accessible storage system, build
an index that allows us to search for column titles, nd a way to simulta-
neously extract all of the relevant XML les and their associated TIFFs,
and then nally import them into a new database. All of this is technically
possible and the Labs team are currently working to make the data set
more accessible to all researchers who want to pursue work of this nature.
However, the rst stage of the Victorian Meme Machine project was only
funded for six months, so we decided to press ahead with a small sample
of manually extracted columns and focus our attention on the next stages
of the project.
For our sample we manually downloaded all of the ‘Jokes of the
Day’ columns published by Lloyd’s Weekly News in 1891. ese columns
contain a mixture of joke formats — puns, conversations, comic stories,
etc.— and are formatted in a way that makes them broadly representative
of the material found elsewhere in the database. If we can nd a way to
process 1000 jokes from this source, we should be able to scale things up to
manage 100,000 similar jokes from other newspapers. Our sample of joke
columns was downloaded as a set of JPG images. In order to make them
keyword searchable and send them out in ‘remixed’ formats over social
media we rst needed to convert them into accurate, machine-readable
text. Unfortunately, the quality of the original OCR makes it dicult to
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fully automate this process. Here is an example of how one joke has been
interpreted by OCR software (Fig. 4):
Fig. 4: e accuracy of OCR software. e joke comes from ‘Laugh and Grow
Fat’, Hampshire Telegraph, 20 April 1889, p.11.
Some jokes have been captured more successfully than this, but many are
substantially worse. Joke columns often appeared at the edge of a page,
which makes them susceptible to fading and page bending. ey also make
use of unusual punctuation, which tends to confuse OCR software. Unlike
newspaper archives, which retain a limited degree of search-related func-
tionality even with relatively low-quality OCR, our project requires 100 per
cent accuracy (or something close) in order to remix the jokes and repub-
lish them in new formats.
For the pilot stage of the project, we built a temporary transcription
platform using the open source publishing platform Omeka, and a plug-in
called Scripto. It is not ideally suited to the specic needs of the project
and will need to be replaced, but it enabled us to quickly set up a suc-
cessful workow without building a bespoke transcription platform. Here
is an example of a typical transcription page (Fig. 5). This transcription
process is currently open to a small group of volunteers: the project
team, a couple of other members of sta at the British Library, and ten of
my students at Edge Hill University. In the space of a few days, they man-
aged to add 700 jokes to the database. is is a promising start and has
provided us with some useful data, but if we want to create an archive of
one million Victorian jokes then we will need to scale things up.
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In recent years, crowdsourcing initiatives have become increas-
ingly central to the development of new digital resources. Projects such as
Dickens Journals Online, Transcribe Bentham, and the Zooniverse, not to
mention the long-running Project Gutenberg, have all demonstrated what
can be achieved by attracting an active community of volunteers to help
tag and transcribe data. However, crowdsourcing projects face at least four
key challenges: attracting a community of appropriate volunteers; keeping
Fig. 5: Transcribing Victorian jokes using Omeka and Scripto.
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this community of volunteers motivated; ensuring that volunteers produce
high-quality work; and making sure that the free labour provided by these
volunteers is organized in an ethical fashion. In order to attract and motivate
volunteers, some digitization projects have attempted to borrow techniques
developed in the computer game industry. As Scott Nicholson puts it:
A common implementation of gamication is to take the
scoring elements of video games, such as points, levels, and
achievements, and apply them to a work or educational con-
text. ile the term is relatively new, the concept has been
around for some time through loyalty systems like frequent
yer miles, green stamps, and library summer reading pro-
grams. ese gamication programs can increase the use of
a service and change behavior, as users work toward meeting
these goals to reach external rewards.36
For example, UCL’s Transcribe Bentham project motivates its volunteers by
displaying a regularly updated ‘Top Contributors’ league table. Users earn
points by completing more transcriptions and have the ability to work up
from the rank of ‘Novice’ (2500 points) to ‘Prodigy’ (75,000). Points are
also earned by inviting friends to do transcriptions and by participating in
online discussions. e project has now transcribed more than seventeen
thousand handwritten manuscripts, which suggests the approach has mer-
its, although it is possible of course that volunteers were more motivated
by the opportunity to contribute to an important historical project than to
rise up a league table.
e problem with current approaches to gamication is that they
usually rely on an arbitrary and essentially meaningless scoring system of
points and badges to reward the transcription eort. It appears that these
techniques only motivate users for a relatively short time. en Chris
Lintott, founder of the Zooniverse project, experimented with this kind of
gamication he found that
the best people were systematically leaving, because once you
switch into collecting points, and you nd you’re winning
the game, then you get the impression that you’ve nished—
mastered it — and you put the game down. We’d essentially
built a system that drove away our best people.37
36 Scott Nicholson, ‘A User-Centered eoretical Framework for Meaningful Gami-
fication’, (2012) <http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/meaningfulframework.pdf>
[accessed 5 October 2015].
37 Quoted in Chris Parr, ‘y Citizen Scientists Help and How to Keep em
Hooked’, Times Higher Education, 6 June 2013 <https://www.timeshighereducation.
co.uk/news/why-citizen-scientists-help-and-how-to-keep-them-hooked/2004321.
article> [accessed 5 October 2015].
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In order to address these problems, Scott Nicholson argues that we need
to develop more ‘meaningful’ forms of gamication that focus ‘on intro-
ducing elements of play instead of elements of scoring’. In other words,
volunteers on transcription projects might be more engaged and motivated
if the act of transcription was more playful or creative, and if it rewarded
them with something of value. Crucially, this kind of meaningful gami-
cation helps to balance the ethics of labour involved in crowdsourcing
initiatives. Professional academics benet in very tangible ways from these
projects; we are, after all, paid for our time, list them on our CVs, draw
upon them for publications, and use them to attract external funding. All
of this is only made possible by the eorts of volunteers, who are encour-
aged to participate for their own enjoyment or the greater good of society.
An ethically designed gamication system therefore should not be used to
‘trick’ users into doing our labour for free, but should reward them with
something (whether it be an experience or a digital artefact) that they deem
of genuine value.
As part of the Victorian Jokes project, we are currently building a new
transcription platform to test this approach. As our users transcribe a joke
and add descriptive metadata, our interface will slowly build a cartoon rep-
resentation of the joke. Initially this will start with the text, but the cartoon
will be updated as users provide more information about the specic joke.
For example, if a user tells us that a joke features a conversation between
a man and his mother-in-law, then the associated cartoon image will auto-
matically be updated to feature a male and female character. Similarly, if a
user tags the location of the same joke as a ‘Kitchen’, then the background
of the image will be adjusted accordingly. Each piece of metadata added by
the user will simultaneously improve both the quality of their cartoon and
the quality of our database. Here is an early mock-up of what this interface
might eventually look like (Fig. 6). Once the transcription and tagging is
complete, users will have the option to share their completed comic with
friends and followers on social media, or save it to a gallery on the archive’s
website. As well as motivating users to contribute high-quality entries to
our jokes database, the creation and circulation of the comics will publicize
the project and hopefully attract new volunteers.
We are still working on developing this interface. However, in order
to test the potential of releasing Victorian jokes over social media, we built
the Victorian Meme Machine. is tool takes Victorian jokes from our
database and automatically pairs them with illustrations from the British
Library’s nineteenth-century collections. We have experimented with a
range of dierent formats and images, each of which reimagines the jokes
in dierent ways. Our earliest mock-ups mimicked the formatting of illus-
trated jokes from Punch magazine, which typically placed captions and
lines of dialogue below a cartoon. In the case of Punch, the textual and
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visual elements of the joke were purpose-built to accompany one another.
In our case, we needed to recycle existing images from other Victorian pub-
lications. We sourced sample images from the Illustrated Police News (a won-
derful source of bizarre characters and situations), a million images that
were extracted by the British Library Labs from nineteenth-century books
and uploaded to Flickr, and the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration
(which has extraordinarily rich metadata for each of their images). ile
we initially endeavoured to nd a close match for our jokes, these pictures
were not designed to accompany our text and often altered its meaning
in interesting new ways. Fig. 7, for example, shows the same joke accom-
panied by two dierent images. e text features a woman talking to a
lawyer and enquiring about the cost of a divorce. e left-hand image fea-
tures a woman sitting at a desk facing a man who could plausibly be a law-
yer, which makes it a fairly literal t for the joke. However, the image also
introduces a third character, who is not present in the text: a man stands
behind the woman and looks sheepishly away from the conversation. We
are invited to account for his presence and factor it into our interpretation
of the joke. It seems likely that this man is the woman’s husband, and so
his passiveness during her conversation about the cost of divorce imbues
the joke with new comic dimensions. On the other hand, the right-hand
version of the joke features the woman and the lawyer conversing in a very
dierent fashion. In this case, the woman is clearly agitated; the fact that
Fig. 6: Mock-up of a comic-based transcription interface.
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she is leaping from her unmade bed indicates some kind of madness or
hysteria. y, we are led to wonder, is she so desperate to secure a divorce?
Our second batch of mock-ups adopted the style of twentieth-
century comic strips and used coloured speech bubbles for dialogue. At
this point, we also began to experiment with images that were even further
removed from the implied context of the original joke. As the examples in
Fig. 8 show, the joke takes on another new light when the woman and the
lawyer are depicted in an amorous embrace, or when the lawyer is left dan-
gling from a rope that is being cut by her husband. e bottom example
is particularly surreal and replaces the woman with a desperate-looking
grizzly bear. en we tested these jokes with audiences, it was the surreal
and unexpected pairings that drew the biggest laughs — the scene with the
bear proved to be especially popular, and this audience feedback shaped
the nature of the images that we selected for the nished version of the
tool. In some respects, this process of testing and rening jokes in partner-
ship with an audience mirrors the techniques used by Victorian editors.
E. T. Raymond, who worked as a journalist in London during the 1890s,
recalled how
by a process of exhaustion, the right jokes [were] reached,
and by due experiment (prize competitions and the like) con-
ducted with all the seriousness of a Home Oce analysis, it is
found which particular kind of joke brings the greatest hap-
piness to the greatest number. is discovery made, the joke
is made the subject of mass production, and vast stocks are
poured out until the bookstall agents recommend a change.38
38 E. T. Raymond, Portraits of the Nineties (London: Fisher Unwin, 1921), p.305.
Fig. 7: Punch-style mock-ups of a Victorian joke paired with two dierent images.
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Finally, before launching into this stage of mass production, we also
experimented with a design that pastiched the modern ‘memes’ that are
currently very popular on social media. In visual terms, these memes
usually feature white text placed over an image, with the set-up at the top and
the punchline at the bottom. ese images are not randomly selected, but
are drawn from a relatively narrow pool of regularly reoccurring pictures—
each of which is associated with a particular kind of joke. Readers who
are unfamiliar with this peculiar subgenre of Internet humour may wish
to consult the Know Your Meme website in order to make sense of what
follows, though be warned that its contents are not entirely safe for work.
Fig. 9 shows a sample of Victorian jokes that have been mapped onto these
memes in ways that are broadly faithful to their modern-day usage. Most
of the images we selected for our test are conventionally used to communi-
cate lame puns, which makes them ready-made vehicles for Victorian jokes.
Some, such as the ‘Picard Face Palm’ or the ‘Dad Joke Dog’ are designed
to highlight the awfulness of the joke. e ‘Bad Joke Eel’, ‘Pun Dog’, and
the ‘CSI 4 Pane’ images work in a similar way, but invite us to laugh at the
exuberance of the characters telling these bad jokes. e ‘Philosoraptor’
and ‘YodaSpeak’ memes are conventionally used to represent metaphysical
thinking or sagacious thoughts, which makes them suited to carrying the
pieces of cod philosophy that appeared in Victorian joke columns. Finally,
the ‘Anchorman’ and Muppet newsreader images are usually used to carry
comic news stories and headlines. ese pictures are an appropriate home
for Victorian jokes that masqueraded as news stories. Taken together, these
formats oer an interesting alternative to the recognizably Victorian aes-
thetic of the rst mock-ups. Without any visual or bibliographical clues,
it is possible that some of these jokes might pass for genuinely modern
memes. If our aim is to reintroduce Victorian jokes into the bloodstream
of modern culture, then stripping them of their more obvious Victorian
signiers might give them the best chance of success. Unfortunately, the
creation of the images is dicult to automate — particularly the part of the
process that matches a Victorian joke to the appropriate modern meme. In
many cases, it is impossible to nd an image that works with the subject
and structure of the Victorian text. As a result, we eventually decided to
return to the Victorian-inspired designs of our earlier prototypes.
e format that we eventually adopted for the rst prototype of
our automated Victorian Meme Machine is displayed in Fig. 10. To test
out our software, we selected fty viable images from the British Library’s
nineteenth-century collections. At present, these images are allocated to the
textual jokes on a completely random basis. In the examples below, there is
no reason why a pun about a badly conducted hotel has been paired with an
image featuring an owl attacking a woman in her bed. Future versions of
the tool will hopefully try to match jokes and images based on information
contained within their metadata. For example, under this new system, the
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Fig. 10: Images created by the ‘Victorian Meme Machine’.
joke in Fig. 10 that features the word ‘auctioneer’ would be paired with an
image that has been tagged as featuring an auction or a similar location.
At present, under the random system, this joke has been paired with an
image of a policeman being bitten by a female cannibal. In order to make
this viable, we will need to source a large library of images and ensure that
they are marked up with a detailed set of descriptive tags. e Database
of Mid-Victorian Illustration has extremely detailed metadata for each of its
images and would be a ready-made solution to this problem. Alternatively,
the British Library’s recent experiments with Flickr have demonstrated the
power of crowdsourcing this information. Since the library uploaded a
million nineteenth-century images to Flickr in December 2013, more than
two hundred thousand descriptive tags have been added by members of
the public.39 ese tags could be used by future versions of the Victorian
Meme Machine to improve the pairing of texts and images. At present, our
39 See the British Library’s Flickr photostream <https://www.ickr.com/photos/
britishlibrary> [accessed 4 October 2015].
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software reformats the textual jokes transcribed from newspaper columns
into coloured speech bubbles that appear at the top of the image. is
leaves space at the bottom to provide the bibliographical details that link
a joke to its original historical context. Our current design includes the
title and page number of the book or newspaper from which the joke was
clipped, the date that it was published, and the name of any additional
authors or publications to which the joke was attributed. Future versions
will include similar details for the image. ese sections are larger than I
would like and are in danger of detracting from the design of the main joke.
Nevertheless, they are an important concession to the historical dimensions
of the project and help explain the composition of the memes for audi-
ences who are unfamiliar with it. e end results are rather hit-and-miss.
By completely automating the processes of remixing, we have opened up
the possibility for our software to generate surprising new juxtapositions
between texts and images that would never have been created otherwise.
is approach leads to more of the surreal combinations that received posi-
tive feedback from our early audiences. However, the images are often so
disconnected from their texts as to make the whole thing unintelligible.
As we have seen, the project’s next prototype will rely on the creative deci-
sions of our transcribers when generating the images. is should result in
more intelligible jokes, but it may also sacrice the chaotic creativity of the
automated approach. e success of a joke generally rests on its capacity to
surprise an audience with something unexpected; carefully curated, literal
interpretations of the text may well be less eective at this than randomly
generated wisecracking bears and sea monsters.
Each lunchtime, our ‘Mechanical Comedian’ (@VictorianHumour)
posts one of these images on Twitter. e jokes are introduced with a cli-
chéd comedy set-up line, such as ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way
over here…’. Most of the time, the random combination of joke, image,
and set-up is rather jarring. However, sometimes the elements combine
rather nicely (Fig. 11).
e Mechanical Comedian’s performance has met with a warm, if
not ecstatic, reception. At the time of writing, it has been ‘telling’ jokes for
four months and has accumulated 256 Twitter followers. Most of the jokes
receive a small number of retweets and favourites, but none have managed
to go viral. en the new transcription tool is completed, this situation
may improve. Users will begin to exercise their creativity and judgement
over the composition of the images and will also have a greater stake in
ensuring that they are shared over social media. As the project expands,
we also intend to run regular ‘Make is Funny’ competitions. Members
of the public will be invited to creatively reinterpret an expired joke in an
attempt to restore its humour. ese retellings might take the form of car-
toons, comic strips, stand-up performances, lms, animations, or any other
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medium that users wish to experiment with. In order to test the potential
of this outreach work, we sent our collection of jokes to lmmaker Rob
Walker and invited him to make them funny again. He produced an anima-
tion entitled My Mother In Law.40
is is a parody of a 1970s sitcom that was made using original Victorian
jokes and images, and presented in a style reminiscent of Monty Python. It
is a curious blend that somehow works — it is certainly the closest we have
come to making people laugh.
e success of Rob Walker’s animation nicely captures the ethos
that underpins our wider project. Our own attempts to revitalize Victorian
jokes using the Mechanical Comedian’s crude and fairly limited template
have met with a relatively lukewarm response. However, when we unshack-
led the jokes from these restrictions and encouraged an artist to creatively
engage on his own terms, the results were more exciting. e same is true
of digital collections more broadly. By liberating data sets from the restric-
tions imposed by existing archives, we gain the chance to playfully test
their possibilities; the opportunity to explore, interpret, and reuse them in
interesting and useful ways. e Victorian Jokes project is a small example
of how existing archives might be remixed to produce new data sets. If
we are successful in our attempts to encourage crowdsourced transcrip-
tion via meaningful forms of gamication, then similar approaches could
be used to create a range of new archives. Imagine, for instance, how the
transcription of nineteenth-century recipe columns might be incentivized
40 Rob Walker, My Mother In Law, online animation, Rob Walker Films, 20 June 2015
<http://www.robwalkerlms.com/content/my-mother-law> [accessed 5 October 2015].
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by inviting users to tag ingredients. is data could then be used to auto-
matically generate a shopping list, and then users could return with a pic-
ture and review of the dish once they have tried to make it. Sports reports,
fashion columns, children’s corners, stock market bulletins, and a range of
other historical newspaper genres could be extracted and enriched with
new metadata in equally creative ways. e Victorian jokes database repre-
sents an experimental rst step along that road. ere is still a lot of work
to be done before its potential begins to be realized. Currently, we need
more funding and resources to develop our existing tools into fully func-
tional prototypes. In the end, by remixing the nineteenth-century archive I
hope we will be able to rescue thousands of Victorian jokes from obscurity
and make them accessible to academic researchers in useful new ways. But
it would be a shame if their journey were to end here. As we saw with the
joke about Lord Overstone, Victorian humour circulated within a vibrant
culture of transnational and intertextual reprinting. By posting the jokes
on social media and inviting audiences to share and reinterpret them, we
open them up to an equally vibrant ‘culture of retweeting’.41 Perhaps, after
more than a century in retirement, some of these long-forgotten jokes will
once again raise a smile.
41 Bob Nicholson, ‘Tweeting the Victorians’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48 (2015),
254–60 (p.257).