Life, 1884-01-17 · page 9 of 16
Life — January 17, 1884 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Explanation for Modern Readers This satirical cartoon criticizes church bell-ringing practices. The top panel shows a choir on a church balcony singing "popular airs" before services while holding "Peek-a-Boo" songbooks—suggesting frivolous entertainment rather than sacred music. The accompanying text proposes an absurd alternative: letting the choir perform on the steeple, where they might "shoot off fire-crackers in mid-air" to collect children. The bottom section, titled "TO THE CLAMOROUS CLERGY," attacks bell-ringing itself as spiritually hollow, calling it merely "rolling" that produces "glory" from stone rather than genuine human virtue. The woman and child figures suggest the disturbance affects families. The satire targets 19th-century church practices perceived as noisy, undignified, or profit-driven rather than genuinely pious.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
{I fet the chor $14 Some opular air = before church time ,on a baleony 7 out side the cu _. or— the cexto tight climb ‘the, ___ Steeple and ee Off fire-crackers In mid-air, - o Pr hdchildven, could be collected thuely. TO JHE CLAMOROUS CLERGY. AND WHO, IN TOLLING, TOLLING, TOLLING, ,FEEL A GLORY IN SO ROLLING i J @N THE HUMAN HEART A STONE— THEY ARE NEITHER MAN NOR WOMAN, THEY ARE NEITHER BRUTE NOR HUMAN, THEY ARE GHOULS! —The Bells. comicbooks.com