OTHER TIMES, OTHER FUN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 507, 11 March 1949, Page 14

OTHER TIMES, OTHER FUN

THE ENGLISH COMIC ALBUM. Compiled by Leonard Russell and Nicholas Bentley. (Michael Joseph. 15/-) EONARD RUSSELL, editor amongst other things of the annual Saturday Book, has ideas, style, gentle wit, and a

feeling for contemporary tastes. He has been assiduous in collecting, packaging, and labelling anthologies on the higher middle brow level. There is nothing obscure or high flowm about his judgments, when he makes judgments, but his writing is easy and elliptical enough to convey, rather flatteringly, that he knows his readers are almost as familiar with his subject as he is. This album covers a century, beginning in the eighteen-forties, when the middle class was still stfuggling to establish itself, and Punch was a radical paper, "conducted by chartists, deists, atheists, anarchists and socialists, to a man," and ending in our own forties. The hundred years of technological development have seen Punch become staid and man flippantly fearful. The pace of the change in society accelerated immensely in the last two decades. It’s a long way from Keene to Acanthus, but though the elapsed time may be less, the ‘spiritual division between Beerbohm’s flapper of 1929 and Giles’s chunky, ‘primitive survivals of World War II is immeasurably greater. Leonard Russell shows us these things without pushing’ himself forward, and shows them within the covers of a satisfyingly produced and colourfully decor- ated book.