Woman from His horn book, for the use of greenhorns and others who would learn of the anthropophagi and divers strange things existing at the end of the XIXth century (1898), by Wallis Mackay (1852-1907). The sketch here seems to suggest how much the ideals of beauty have changed, or perhaps how the modern woman has abandoned them in favour of new freedoms — to cycle, for example, like this woman in her full riding-gear, including jaunty hat. She has a cigarette in one hand, and her reflections on the Venus de Milo are contained in a puff of tobacco smoke. In such various manifestations, woman a puzzle that bachelors are unable to solve, and that married men are solved by. If too much at the woman's mercy, such men need to get together with each other, says Mackay, and escape somewhere. It may be pertinent to observe that Mackay was a Freemason (something that comes up in his Prisoner of Chiloane).
Image download and text by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them and (2) link your document to this URL or cite it in a print document.
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Bibliography
Mackay, Wallis. His horn book, for the use of greenhorns and others who would learn of the anthropophagi and divers strange things existing at the end of the XIXth century. London, J. Macqueen, [1898]. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Brittle Books Project, 2011. Web. 5 April 2016.
Created 5 April 2016