I've spent the last three years researching the history of nineteenth-century humour and cultures of joke-telling. This is part of a collaborative project I've been leading with the British Library that aims to create an online archive of one million historical jokes. The archive is still under construction, but our @VictorianHumour twitter feed and Facebook page shares a new (or rather an old) joke every day. I should point out that we've been posting Georgian humour for the last month (more on this distinction shortly), but work back a few weeks and you'll find plenty of Victorian jests.

Your question about 'edgy' humour is an interesting one, but comes laden with problems. Our understanding of Victorian humour is heavily dependent on the surviving historical record, which tends to privilege mainstream (and generally quite respectable) books and newspapers. The kind of jokes that were published in these texts were usually suitable for a family audience. In fact, many of the period's joke books took great pains to emphasise the unimpugnable respectability of their contents and their suitability for a domestic audience - an assurance that hints at the existence of unrespectable jokes, but gets us no closer to finding them.

If you browse our twitter feed, you'll see that the vast majority of surviving nineteenth-century jokes are fairly tame. There are a lot of laboured puns, occasional pieces of political satire, and brief character sketches featuring lawyers, mothers-in-law, Irishmen, cheeky schoolboys, etc.

Of course, just like today, there's a big difference between jokes that are published, and those that are told in private amongst friends. For instance, an inside account of one of the famous weekly dinners held by contributors to Punch magazine includes a recollection that the novelist Shirley Brooks told the following joke:

"If you put your head between your legs, what planet do you see? Uranus."

Aparently Thackeray was 'consumed with laughter', and proceeded to crack a joke about his own problems with urethral stricture. This kind of bodily humour usually wouldn't appear in Punch magazine itself, and the joke was altered to a political quip in an officially published description of this dinner. In short, it's likely that the Victorians told all sorts of dirty jokes, but didn't commit them regularly to print.

We have some tantalising glimpses of these illicit jokes. For example, a pornographic magazine named The Pearl (c. 1880) published some dirty jokes and limericks. The twitter account @WhoresOfYore has posted quite a few of these. Here's one:

There was a young lady of Hitchin,

Who was skrotching her cunt in the kitchen;

Her father said "Rose,

It's the crabs, I suppose."

"You're right, pa, the buggers are itching."

Slightly less risque examples appeared in Victorian 'lads' mags' like the Illustrated Police News and the Racing Post, both of which were pitched at an audience of virile young men-about-town. Music Hall humour could also be quite risque, but this was often communicated via innuendo and signalled through the nudge-nudge, wink-wink of the performance (something that's lost a bit in the surviving texts). I haven't encountered evidence of a straightforwardly, or deliberately, offensive comic working in Vaudeville or Music Hall, but I wouldn't like to state definitively that such performers didn't exist.

As for the subjects of race and religion, you'll find plenty of jokes in respectable Victorian newspapers that we would now consider racist. We don't post these ones on the twitter feed - the British Library has to be a bit cautious about them being taken out of context - but they'll appear uncensored in the finished archive. The mischievous 'negro' or 'darkie' was a staple character in Victorian jokes, particularly those that were imported into Britain from the United States. One provincial newspaper (the Hampshire Telegraph, I think...) published several joke columns in the 1880s with titles like 'In Dixie's Land: Old Sambo At His Tricks Again' that were entirely composed of imported racial humour. Jokes made at the expense of the dominant religion were generally less acceptable (unlike jokes directed at other religions or denominations), though there were plenty of biblical-themed puns in circulation.

Victorian commentators observed that American joke writers were more irreverent than their British counterparts and more willing to joke about "the awful mystery of death." "Nothing is sacred to a Yankee", observed the Ipswich Journal after printing the following droll epitaph taken from a child’s grave in Wisconsin:

A little cough,

It took him off;

And a little coffin,

We took him off in.

But this is still fairly gentle stuff, and American jokes were imported in enormous quantities by respectable British newspaper editors.

If you want to see more risque humour then you're better off looking at the Georgian period. As you'll see from some of the more recent posts on our twitter feed, there are a lot more jokes about whores, sex, and bodily functions. You can see further evidence of this in the sexually explicit work of caricaturists like Thomas Rowlandson, which would have been on display in printshop windows. The emergence of a Victorian culture of middle-class respectability didn't kill off ribald humour like this, but it seems to have driven a lot of it underground and beyond the reach of the historian.

I could write about this stuff for ever, so if you have any follow-up questions then I'd be happy to field them.

If you’d like to read more about the history of Victorian jokes then you might also like some of the more scholarly articles I’ve written:

An article for The Conversation - lots of christmas-themed jokes here, which might be a bit unseasonal for May...

‘The Victorian Meme Machine: Remixing the Nineteenth-Century Archive’ [Open Access]

‘You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!’: Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press [Requires Subscription – PM me for a free copy]

JONATHAN'S JOKES: American humour in the late-Victorian press [Requires Subscription – PM me for a free copy]