MANUSCRIPT. – Ernest Frederick BARNES-LAWRENCE and C.H. BARNES-LAWRENCE.

MANUSCRIPT. – Ernest Frederick BARNES-LAWRENCE and C.H. BARNES-LAWRENCE. The Funnel, a Journal of Fun Fashion & Folly. London: [N.p.:] April-May 1883. 42pp., manuscript, tall 4to (328 x 194mm.) 21 leaves in one or two legible hands (‘The Editors’), including a parodic signed portrait frontispiece, sketches on tennis, dress, women’s fashion (and a piece ‘from one of the Brotherhood’), jokes, songs and poems, a political cartoon of Gladstone, and with approx. 25 original ink drawings (3 mounted) and numerous vignettes by the author and some illustrations by ‘C.H.B-L’, all in the comic style of ‘Punch’. (Browning.) Original green cloth, gilt titling to upper cover (toned). Note: the ‘Editorial Notice’ says the intention is to publish a monthly edition of ‘The Funnel’, edited alternately by E.F.B.L and C.H.B.L. The latter is, perhaps, Ernest’s brother, Charles Henry. Amid the merriment, the two editors – or the alter-ego- enjoy interjecting with asides and ‘Notices’. While some of these are apologetic (‘the editor wishes it to be clearly understood that he is infinitely sensible of its [‘The Funnel’] shortcomings’, there is another ‘Personal Note’ where the editor describes the increased police presence in ‘Charing X’ due to ‘recent bombings’. The political violence of Irish Republicans had increased in the previous two years, and Whitehall itself was bombed a few weeks earlier. In the next sentence the editor ‘wonders how it is that one meets so many more handsome men than women walking in Regent Street every day’. An interesting slither of late-Victorian life in London.

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