Collaboration in Bohemia: Cross-Channel Print Networks and Bohemian Comic Journalism

Abstract

This paper uses a recently rediscovered archive of French business correspondence belonging to Fleet Street publisher James Vizetelly to shine a new light on mid-Victorian London’s bohemian tradition. Investigating the commercial enterprises that underpinned the cultural exchange and intellectual connection between press networks in Paris and London at midcentury, the paper finds cross-Channel collaboration to be both the genesis and the defining characteristic of bohemianism. An analysis of three comic journals published in 1848—Puppet Show, the Man in the Moon, and Chat—provides examples of how these processes of collaboration manifested in print to animate bohemia’s comic journals.