Stephen Roberts and Roger Ward, Mocking Men of Power: Comic Art in Birmingham, 1861–1911 (Birmingham: Birmingham Biographies, 2014), pp. iv+148, £8.99 paperback

Abstract

The authors of this tremendous little volume have done a great service to the scholarship on Victorian comic art and the satirical press in a key non-Metropolitan context. The excessive scholarly and popular focus on London-based satirical art is something that has only recently come under scrutiny. Henry Miller, in “The Problem with Punch” (<i>Historical Research</i> 82, no. 216 [2009]: 285–302), was arguably the first to take aim at how scholars have largely ignored provincial Britain (as did Punch itself), despite the flourishing and strikingly original work that appeared in comic periodicals published in centers like Birmingham, Liverpool, and Norwich. What Miller hinted at—that Birmingham was probably the most important of these locations—is now affirmed by the good work of Roberts and Ward.