Overview
This delightful book is an anthology of Beerbohm's best images, accompanied by historical and analytical commentary by John Hall that is enriched by liberal quotation from Beerbohm's own witty essays, criticism, letters and fiction. The 213 caricatures reproduced here are arranged in chapters by category: writers, including Wilde, Kipling, James, Conrad, Yeats, Twain, Wells, Hardy, Strachey, Forster, and Pound; theatre people, including Ibsen, Shaw, and Barrie; artists, including Whistler, Sargent, and Fry; politicians, including Disraeli, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Churchill; royalty, especially King Edward VII (Beerbohm's favourite subject), but also Queen Victoria, George V, and Edward VIII; and miscellaneous contemporaries, including Caruso, Sousa, and financier Alfred De Rothschild. Also reproduced are generous selections from Beerbohm's two books of caricatures dealing with the past: Dante, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Browning from The Poet's Corner; and Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Morris and others from Rossetti and His Circle. The final chapter is devoted to self-portraits.Synopsis
This delightful book is an anthology of Beerbohm's best images, accompanied by historical and analytical commentary by John Hall that is enriched by liberal quotation from Beerbohm's own witty essays, criticism, letters and fiction. The 213 caricatures reproduced here are arranged in chapters by category: writers, including Wilde, Kipling, James, Conrad, Yeats, Twain, Wells, Hardy, Strachey, Forster, and Pound; theatre people, including Ibsen, Shaw, and Barrie; artists, including Whistler, Sargent, and Fry; politicians, including Disraeli, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Churchill; royalty, especially King Edward VII (Beerbohm's favourite subject), but also Queen Victoria, George V, and Edward VIII; and miscellaneous contemporaries, including Caruso, Sousa, and financier Alfred De Rothschild. Also reproduced are generous selections from Beerbohm's two books of caricatures dealing with the past: Dante, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Browning from The Poet's Corner; and Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Morris and others from Rossetti and His Circle. The final chapter is devoted to self-portraits.