Life, 1891-12-17 · page 13 of 14
Life — December 17, 1891 — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Explanation for Modern Readers This 1890s Life magazine satirizes Boston's obsession with the card game whist. The cartoon depicts a luxurious train car where wealthy Bostonians play cards obsessively—morning, afternoon, evening, and even during meals. The satire mocks: 1. **Boston's extreme fad-chasing**: The text claims Bostonians abandon reason entirely when adopting trends, "rolling up sleeves" and "going in" with reckless enthusiasm. 2. **"Whisteria"**: A invented disease name (pun on wisteria flowers) describing nervous exhaustion from excessive whist-playing, particularly affecting the city's elite. 3. **Social excess**: The closing jab suggests Bostonians replace one obsession with another so quickly they never recover—comparing a woman "hilariously drunk on whist" to one still traumatized by arsenic poisoning (likely a contemporaneous scare). The cartoon ridicules upper-class Boston culture as shallow, addiction-prone, and prone to mass hysteria over fashionable pastimes.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LIFE’S RESEARCHES IN ROMAN RAILWAYS. IN THE DRAWING-ROOM CAR, WHISTERIA, HAT is what the Bostonians call the new disease now raging in their midst. It is the effect produced by too much whist upon a nervous temperament. When Boston likes anything she rolls up her sl burns her bridges, packs away her reason in camphor and “ goes For some time she has been deliriously insane on whist. They play in in. the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening. Between times and at meals they talk about it. At night they dream of it. The strong ones survive, but the weaker become victims of whisteria, If Boston could so manage as to get longer intervals between her fads it might be a gain. What can be sadder than the sight of a respectable old lady hilariously [f+ “VECE og pine’ drunk on whist before she has recuperated from the unpleasant discovery that all nature has been trying to poison her with arsenic ? = = comicbooks.com