Betrothal -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
There was _Herodotus_, and _The Swiss Family Robinson_, and _Gulliver’s
Travels_; _Pamela_, and a first edition of _Alice_ (Gran’papa approved
of Tenniel) and three or four single poems, each a book to itself, with
a profusion of bright-coloured illustrations—_Gilpin_, _The Elegy on a
Mad Dog_, _The Three Jovial Hunstmen_, and Laura’s favourite, _So She
went into the Garden to get a Cabbage Leaf_. There was the _Churchman’s
Family Bible_, with Adam in voluminous goatskin draperies, and Eve with
hair like Mother, and square capital letters at the beginning of
chapters with tiny pictures filled into them. There were the
Cruikshanks—huge albums into which Gran’papa had pasted every print or
drawing of his favourite artist that he had come across in fifty magpie
years. And there was _Mr. Punch_, immortal _Mr. Punch_, endless volumes
of him, inexhaustible, a mine of delight, and the true explanation of
the singular and detailed acquaintance with Victorian politics with
which Laura of the tenacious memory could, on occasion, confound an
opponent. Pouring over the cartoons, devouring the antiquated
letter-press as only a small child can, she had bewildered Aunt Adela
one day on a visit to Madame Tussaud, by her delighted recognition of
group after group of Her Majesty’s Ministers who had died before she was
born. She adored Lord Salisbury, for instance, and pitied him deeply for
losing his wife, for she had him thoroughly entangled with _The Lord of
Burleigh_. But her favourites were naughty Randolph, the mustachioed
schoolboy, being very rude to Mr. Gladstone, and ‘Joey,’ whose speeches
in that last tragic tour she cut out and kept and learned by heart, and
would declaim unweariedly to the looking-glass and the indifferent
twins, and who was nevertheless inextricably confused in her teeming,
unfocussed mind with her one delirious pantomime and Mr. Alfred Jingle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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