Marie Duval: the methods and politics of attribution

Visual journalist and actress Marie Duval (Isabella Emily Louisa Tessier, 1847–90) was one of the most unusual, pioneering, and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. Her work focused on the humour of the types of people she knew, in a period of diversifying leisure activities for working people. Frequently importing the ethics and practices of the theatre into the periodical press, Duval’s work distributed marginalized ideas (such as a woman employing masculine humour, or feminizing employment in the print industries) to a wide readership, increasingly rendering these ideas and types of behaviour unremarkable. This chapter outlines Duval’s achievement as a visual journalist and the ways in which her work continued to be obscured, stolen, and erased, through phases of denial, exclusion, and neglect, from the 1880s onwards. The chapter describes the specific problems that the mechanisms of this obfuscation and erasure continue to create, for attribution of both signed and unsigned work by Duval, most recently because of a lack of attribution in the metadata of digitized collections.