A Christmas garland
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- London: William Heinemann, 1912
London: William Heinemann, 1912. FIRST EDITION. Bound in bright blue cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, without the dust jacket; a very nice copy with a gift presentation on the flyleaf dated Christmas, 1910. First edition, first issue. A collection of Christmas-themed parodies of famous authors, including Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells. Beerbohm skillfully captures the style and voice of each of his targets, to widespread critical acclaim. Henry James was delighted by Beerbohm’s parody of his work, remarking that the novel was “the most intelligent thing that has been produced in England for many a long day.”
Virginia Woolf commented:
“[Beerbohm] was affected by private joys and sorrows and had no gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and himself he has remained…He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes…He is without doubt the prince of his profession.”
While centered on writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Beerbohm’s work has a longstanding appeal. John Updike said that:
“A Christmas garland is surely the liber aureus of prose parody…What makes Max, as a parodist, incomparable—more than the calm mounting from felicity to felicity and the perfectly scaled enlargement of every surface quirk of the subject style—is the way he seizes and embraces, with something like love, the total personality of the parodee. He seems to enclose in a transparent omniscience the genius of each star as, in A Christmas garland, he methodically moves across the firmament of Edwardian letters.”
Beerbohm (1872-1956), English writer, critic, and caricaturist, first gained cultural acclaim as an aesthete and dandy in Oscar Wilde’s circle. Author of several novels and essays, he was also the drama critic for the Saturday Review for over a decade.
Gallatin: 10.
Virginia Woolf commented:
“[Beerbohm] was affected by private joys and sorrows and had no gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and himself he has remained…He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes…He is without doubt the prince of his profession.”
While centered on writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Beerbohm’s work has a longstanding appeal. John Updike said that:
“A Christmas garland is surely the liber aureus of prose parody…What makes Max, as a parodist, incomparable—more than the calm mounting from felicity to felicity and the perfectly scaled enlargement of every surface quirk of the subject style—is the way he seizes and embraces, with something like love, the total personality of the parodee. He seems to enclose in a transparent omniscience the genius of each star as, in A Christmas garland, he methodically moves across the firmament of Edwardian letters.”
Beerbohm (1872-1956), English writer, critic, and caricaturist, first gained cultural acclaim as an aesthete and dandy in Oscar Wilde’s circle. Author of several novels and essays, he was also the drama critic for the Saturday Review for over a decade.
Gallatin: 10.
Details
Title
A Christmas garland
Author
BEERBOHM, Max
Condition
Unknown
Publisher
William Heinemann: London
Date
1912
Edition
FIRST EDITION