Life, 1889-03-07 · page 9 of 18
Life — March 7, 1889 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis of Life Magazine Page 137 This page contains "Life's Gallery of Beauties No. 8," featuring **Mr. Kyrle Bellew**, an actor. The biographical text describes his romantic background—born to a beautiful Duchess in an equatorial location, raised by relatives, and connected to notable English families through marriage. The main photograph shows Bellew posing with donkeys on a beach, a humorous juxtaposition of theatrical glamour with mundane seaside animals. Below is an unrelated cartoon titled "Suburban Housekeeping" depicting a domestic scene with a woman and man, with dialogue about naming "the gurls in the town." This appears to be satirizing small-town social dynamics and domestic life. The page mixes theatrical celebrity profiles with social satire typical of Life's format.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LIFE’S GALLERY OF BEAUTIES. No. 8 MR. KYRLE BELLEW, MR. KYRLE BELLEW. YRLE BELLEW, né Higgins, is a son of the Rev. Montesquieu Higgins, formerly of the Church of England, or of that part of it located in a chapel on Bloomsbury Square, London. Various narratives, some of a highly romantic, and others of an extremely prosaic, nature are related concerning the reasons why Harry Higgins changed his name and became an actor, the rcmantic tales seeming to emanate distantly from the gentleman himself, and the prosaic ones from his contemporaries. . We place little confidence, however, in the story that he was kid- napped, while a child of twenty-one or twenty-two, by a beautiful Duchess, who bore him off to a tropical isle in an equatorial sea, and conferred upon him the office of maid in the nursery of her grandchildren, whence he escaped in the baby-carriage and joined Henry Irving, who was then starring the East Indies in ‘ Uncle Tom's Cabin.” The tale that Kyrle ran away from home at the age of sixteen, and took command of a Moorish pirate-ship on the Mediterranean, which made a practice of stealing fruit from the coast-wise steamers, and eating it on a desert island, seems more probable, in view of Mr. Bellew’s ferocious and blood-thirsty conduct respecting Mr. Pierre Lorillard and the Tuxedo Club. It is currently reported that, on the occasion in question, Mr, Bellew obtained Mr. Lorillard's umbrella from the hall of the club, and carried it with him to New York. ‘Thence he sent word to the other gentleman that if he (Bellew) did not re-eive a retraction of the insult before nine o'clock on the Friday even- ing of the week after the next, he (Bellew) would break the umbrella. The circumstance that Miss Harriet Coffin afterward pursued Mr. Bellew three times around the counters of a drug-store, and hit him in the back with a bath sponge, should not be used as an argument against his personal courage, since he merely ran to see how far she would pursue him, Mr. Bellew is connected vith a neble English family, a grard- uncle of an aunt on his mother's side being connected by marriage with the nephew of the second son of Sir Mordaunt Higgins, of Higgins-in-the-Soup, in Yorkshire. Noo SUBURBAN HOUSEKEEPING. Domestic (who has been catechising prospective mistress); WELL, MRS, SHARPLY, YOU HAVE RATHER A BAD NAME AMONG THE OURLS IN THE TOWN, BUT O! THINK I'LL GIVE YOU A TRY. comicbooks.com