How to Have Fun Like a Victorian
It is often said in recent months that there have been worse times for quarantine amid a pandemic than an era when we can simply ask a little robot to sing us almost any song ever recorded , or summon a century of films. entertainment with a few clicks of your finger . Heck, in the midst of the bubonic plague in 14th century Italy, all you had to do while you waited for your skin to turn black as you poured to deathwas to sit and tell jokes and dirty stories .
But a book recently revealed to me by my new best Twitter after Dr. Bob Nicholson – that Victorian pop culture historian who recently explored a treasure trove of 19th century theater posters and shared some real gems – suggests that you really do. ” Around 1866, I did a good job of sitting around doing nothing. It was then that American artist, illustrator and cartoonist Frank Bellew published The Art of Fun , a book that answers the timeless question: What were people doing with all their time before TV came along? (Answer: “Dress up their hands like tiny Scots and make their fingers dance.”)
Frank Bellew seems to have been the mid-1800s answer to Al Hirschfeld; he drew a popular cartoon of Abraham Lincoln (he was a very tall man, you see), was for a time mistakenly considered the inventor of the patriotic figure of Uncle Sam, and was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (apparently discussing theories of utopian socialism with the latter). Yet all of these accomplishments pale in comparison to The Art of Fun . With this illustrated tome, he set out to do as ambitious as throwing boredom in the ash heap. As the title page says, it is “a book for everyone and allowing everyone to entertain everyone; thus bringing the Millennium as close as can be conveniently achieved in the compass of one small volume. ” It’s a daunting task, but I think if you read the full book on the Project Gutenberg website carefully , you should immediately see that it nailed it completely.
But oh, you say, anyone can put a fist on an older woman’s face: “a long-standing but very funny affair,” which reportedly put Bellew’s friend Nix in a “very fiery state.” But it takes a real genius to realize that the trick becomes even more fun if you make a tiny bonnet, chimney hat, and corncob pipe to decorate your first lady, for example:
While it’s worth noting that despite being 150 years old, it contains a lot of racist and other problematic material (a prime example is the instructions for staging your own show, Punch & Judy), The Art of Amusing is a delight for more than pure nonsense. contains – don’t miss page 112 , which reveals the secret of “creating a giant” with the method we now know as “The Doll Man ” – but for endless “think you should have been there” descriptions of how much fun all this entertainment is will be if you untie them with unsuspecting visitors to your living room.
Take, for example, this enthusiastic re-creation of the scene that followed when a gaggle of party guests bumped into strange stick-shaped objects that I assume looks like a dragon? And a lemon pig:
Everyone chatted over a couple of small objects on the center table. One is a pig, made from lemon, and the other is a dragon, or whatever, adapted from a piece of some root that our friend Nyx picked up in the garden. As you will see, they are very easy to make and not very interesting to make, but they do serve to get people to talk. One man told the story of Foote or some other old wit who, at the same dinner table, after numerous fruitless attempts to cut a pig out of an orange peel, objected to his friend, who asked him about his failure: “Pshaw! you only made one pig, but (pointing to the mess on the table) I made a litter. ” Then, someone else discovered the similarities between the dragon and a mutual friend, which caused a roar of laughter. Then the child exclaimed, “Oh! what a little pig! “and someone answered her:” Yes, honey, it’s a pygmy. “Then the young woman asked how the eyes were drawn, and the young gentleman replied:” With a pigment. “
Oh what fun. You might think that I am making fun of these last year’s citizens, but this is definitely not the case. I live in an era when I stand on the shoulders of giants. The knowledge accumulated over the centuries is available to me with the help of only thought, and I can learn to do almost anything I want. I could fill these empty hours of the pandemic with so many worthwhile things to do, but even if I chose not to, I could at least spend it on, say, putting on a March sisters-style “private theater” or pranking exploding spiders for laughter. or argue about how long it will take to count to a billion (with detailed equations). Instead, I just ask Alex to count for me and go back to doom scrolling, ignoring my reading pile . Maybe it’s time for us all to have some fun, like they did in the Victorian era. But, again, without any vicious racism . This post has added more information on problematic content in The Art of Amusing.