"The domestic income of a more or less typical three-roomed cottage near the docks is at present £17 per week. Among the recent purchases of the family, a pianoforte, costing £50, may be enumerated, although no one in the house can play a note. This looks more wasteful than the common outlay on gramophones, which at least give pleasure. The idea of sound investment is slow in penetration among the suddenly affluent in wages."
Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury.
We dislike carping, but surely a piano is always a sound investment.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In fiction it is certainly true that nothing succeeds like success. There is a sure and very understandable charm in a story of climbing fortunes. Therefore it may be that part of my pleasure in Tasker Jevons (Hutchinson) was due to sympathy with the upward progress of its hero. But much more was certainly due to the art with which Miss May Sinclair has written about it. Tasker Jevons is a book, and a character, that will linger pleasantly in my memory. He was a little man with a great personality, or rather I will say a great purpose, and that was to approve himself in the eyes of the wife whom he worshipped, and her perplexed, slightly contemptuous family. The trouble was that Tasker was in the beginning a hack journalist, socially and personally impossible; and that Viola Thesiger, whom he married, belonged by birth to the rigidest circle of Cathedral society (Miss Sinclair, scorning subterfuge, calls it quite openly Canterbury). So you see the difficulties that beset the Jevons pair. Their story is told here, very effectively, through the mouth of a third person, a fellow-journalist and admirer of Jevons—but quite respectable—the rejected suitor of Viola, and eventually the husband of her sister. Through his clever and observant eyes we watch the progress of Jevons, see him prospering materially, becoming famous and rich and vulgarized. It is an unusually close and rather subtle study of the development of such a man. Eventually there happens that for which the date, Midsummer 1914, will have prepared you, even if you had forgotten that Miss Sinclair had herself served in Belgium with a field ambulance. So the end of the book gives us some vivid War pictures. Taking it all round, I am inclined to consider Tasker Jevons the best of the 1916 novels that has yet come my way.
When, in the first chapter of Moll Davis (Allen and Unwin), you find the heroine having a very pretty dispute with the landlord of the Mischief Inn, and a gallant blade of a fellow coming to her rescue, you will guess what fare is to follow. And, provided that your taste is for diet of the lightest, you will not be disappointed, for no one is more capable than Mr. Bernard Capes of making it palatable. Here we are then back in the year 1661, and in a maze of intrigue. Wit, if we are to believe the novelist, was as plentiful in those days as morals were scarce, and Mr. Capes is not the man to spoil tradition for lack of colour. He calls his book a comedy, but he should have called it a comedy with an interlude; and the part I like best is the interlude. Possibly because he was weary of plots and counterplots he suddenly breaks loose, and with a warning to those who have "an unconquerable repugnance to sentiment" tells a moving tale that has nothing to do with the main narrative. I can thank him unreservedly for this, and for the crop of words which he has added to my vocabulary. "Bingawast," "gingumbobs," and "fubbs" have the right ring, and after a little training I hope to use them with telling effect on my platoon.