Guy Noel Pocock (1880–1955)

Another super presentation in the Kings Treasuries series by Guy Pocock. Yes, it's a collection of pieces from the novel "'Pickwick Papers" but it stands alone beautifully. Dickens is a consummate comedian and here he skewers English mores and culture of the times to wonderful advantage, all the way down to describing things without actually describing them. It seems that lawyers, however, have not changed their courtroom antics much. I think my dad must have loved Pickwick as much as I do because a lot of his 1950's vernacular came obviously from the book: like his frequent trips to Dingley Dell.… (more)

This Everyman anthology, originally published in 1940, collects late 19th and early 20th century humorous writing of a kind which now tends to seem very ponderous. It is the kind of thing that I used to leaf through in old copies of Punch, ignoring the text and looking for the cartoons. Much of it is verbose anecdote, facetious narrative, caricatures of bores or socially pretentious ladies, or verse which treats trivial subjects in a mock-serious manner (such as Ruth Pitter's "Maternal Love Triumphant, or Song of the Virtuous Female Spider").

Some of the excerpts are fine, but one might as well have the whole book rather than a mere chunk of Cold Comfort Farm, The Once and Future King, or one of Wodehouse's tales of Jeeves and Wooster. There are some archetypal limericks and clerihews, but you can find those anywhere. I did enjoy A. D. Godley's classic poem taking "Motor Bus" as a Latin phrase and declining it ("motorem bum", "motores bi", etc.), to the amusement of anyone who studied Latin at school; Quiller-Couch devoting a string of sapphics to the romance of Lady Jane and her gardener; and magisterial parodies of G. K. Chesterton by Sir John Squire and of Henry James by Sir Max Beerbohm. (The Chesterton parody in particular is notably more entertaining than the piece from Chesterton himself.) But I don't think the highlights justify keeping the whole volume on my shelf.

MB 6-ix-2021… (more)