Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 146, January 7, 1914Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 146, January 7, 1914
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
Ten instruments for an orchestra are banjo, pianola, concertina,
mandoline, psalteries, shawms, bagpipes, bells to clash with, violins,
and bassinette.
To die in harness means to die married.
* * * * *
AT THE PLAY.
"THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL."
EMERSON says somewhere that there are great ways of borrowing; that,
if you can contrive to transmute base metal into fine, nobody will
worry as to where you got your base metal from. But, when it is the
other way about, I think you must not be surprised if people ask
you where you lifted your gold. And the answer, in the case of Miss
ELEANOR GATES, is that the nuggets were the property of LEWIS
CARROLL. She has taken the sprightly and fantastic humour of _Alice
in Wonderland,_ passed it through the alembic (if that is the word) of
her American imagination, and the result is something that hardly lets
you smile at all. It is not a typical product of native industry, but
even that does not make it much easier for us to grasp the secret of
its success over there. It would seem that nearly all Transatlantic
humour, indigenous or adoptive, is apt, like certain wines, to suffer
in the process of sea-transit.
Her "Poor Little Rich Girl" is poor because her parents are too
rich. Her father is too busy with finance and her mother with social
climbing to spare time for their daughter's company, so they leave
her to the care of governesses and menials. Her nurse, anxious for
an evening out at a picture-palace, gives the child an overdose of
sleeping-mixture, with the result that she nearly dies of it. In the
course of delirious dreams she finds herself in the "Tell-Tale Forest"
(which threatens to recall _The Palace of Truth_), and here all
the picturesque phrases which she has been in the childish habit of
misinterpreting in their literal sense--"a bee in the bonnet," to
"ride hobbies," "to play ducks and drakes," "to pay the piper," and so
forth--are realised in human or animal form. With these are mixed the
familiar figures of her waking life, all of them exposed in their true
characters so that you can distinguish the devotion of the doctor (who
now appears in pink because he likes riding hobbies) and the affection
of the teddy-bear (now expanded to human proportions) from the
serpentine nature of the governess and the double-faced dealings of
the nurse. Her father, who is a stranger to her, comes on dressed in
banknotes and chained to a safe; her mother, also a stranger, wears
a society bee which buzzes in the place where her bonnet would have
been; and five samples of the fashionable world, where, as you know,
everybody thinks the same thing at the same time, let off recitatives
from time to time in unison. And there was much talk about "Robin
Hood's Barn," a thing I was never told about at an age when I am sure
it would have given me sincere pleasure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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