Judge, 1917-06-16 · page 7 of 28
Judge — June 16, 1917 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a social satire about wedding gifts. A man dismisses the groom as a fool ("calf") and initially doesn't want to give a gift. His companion suggests giving Robert Louis Stevenson's *Travels with a Donkey*—a real travel memoir published in 1879. The joke is a double insult: the gift is sarcastically "appropriate" because (1) it's a budget-friendly travel book for the honeymoon couple, but more pointedly, (2) it's a subtle dig calling the groom a "donkey" to match the earlier "calf" insult. The humor relies on the book's title working as a coded insult. This reflects upper-class Victorian anxiety about unsuitable marriages and the social obligation of gift-giving, while mocking both the groom and the gift-giver's passive-aggressive wit.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Your wife—That chap she’s marrying is such a calf that I really don't care a fig about making any gift at all. ‘ou—I have it. They're to globe-trot at once: why not give her a copy of Stevenson's ** Travels with a Donkey " >