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The British Character - Studied and Revealed
Hardcover
ComicsHumorGeneral World History
ISBN13: 9781443725910
Publisher: Read & Co. Books
Published: Nov 17 2008
Pages: 136
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.44 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Tea, dogs, and the terrible fear of drawing attention to oneself: Pont's cartoons of the late 1930s caught the British at their most recognisable, and they have been quoted ever since.
Pont was Graham Laidler (1908-1940), an architect by training who became one of Punch's best-loved artists. The British Character began as a series in the magazine and was gathered into a book in 1938, with an introduction by E. M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady had made her the sharpest comic chronicler of English middle-class living.
The drawings sit under headings that are jokes in themselves - Breeding, The Empire Spirit, Love of Animals, Social Sense, Rural, Travel, Sport - and they lampoon and champion in the same stroke: the passion for detective stories, the horror of the unfamiliar, the small hypocrisies of class and manners. Laidler died of polio in 1940, at thirty-two, leaving only three collections behind him, which is part of why these pages are still so treasured.
This edition features:
- The complete 1938 collection of Pont's drawings, arranged in the original ten themed sections
- An introduction by E. M. Delafield, the comic novelist behind the Diary of a Provincial Lady
- Cartoons on breeding, the arts, the Empire spirit, love of animals, social sense, and sport
- The work of one of Punch's most quoted artists, whose career was cut short at the age of thirty-two
- A wry portrait of British manners, class, and social habit on the eve of the Second World War
Read & Co. Books is proud to republish The British Character in a new edition, with the original artwork and Delafield's introduction.
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