Life, 1900-12-27 · page 3 of 21
Life — December 27, 1900 — page 3: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis The page features "The End of a Love Story," a romantic illustration captioned "And they lived happily together ever afterwards." Below is a "Society" column containing gossip about New York's fashionable elite. The column describes social events among the wealthy—breakfast gatherings, expensive dinners with elaborate clothing details (green brocade, purple velvet), and scandals. It mentions the Burstygside Doodles, the Stoney Glares family, and Mrs. P. de V. Blazé Rounders, an opera singer. The humor derives from satirizing high society's pretensions: expensive clothing, fashionable events, and social connections are presented with gentle mockery. The column reports both trivial details (what Mrs. Strutt wore) and darker items (a death and family scandals), treating them with equal, deadpan tone—characteristic of Life's satire of Gilded Age society.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE END OF A LOVE STORY, “ And they lived happily together ever afterwards.” Society. R. AND MRS. BONDS TO- BURN had fish for breakfast on Tuesday. Their charm- ing daughter Flissie is to come out this winter. For- eign papers please copy. The Parvenu Plumps © gave a dinner Thursday. Everything was expensive. New York fashionable society is all right. Mrs. Jimmy Overload was there, and she brought Jimmy with her. She was gowned in green brocade, lined with something equally expensive. Mrs. Pursey Strutt was gowned in purple velvet, shot with Kohinors—or the Kohinors were shot with velvet—no,—well, it doesn’t matter. The Burstyngside Boodles are in mourning. Their eldest son Plantaganet fell under a beer wagon on Madison Avenue last Monday. The poor fellow was blind drunk at the time, and his sudden death meets a long-felt—that is, he is deeply mourned by a large circle of friends. Poor Plantey tas dissipated, there is no doubt about that, and he had just brains enough to dress well and to appear like a gentleman when on his guard. But we must not say things like that in a nice obituary. It is whispered that Mrs. P. de V. Blazé Rounders has more than a friendly feeling for a certain well-known opera singer. The opera singer denies it. Her grandfather, it will be remembered, was the Bishop of Roundersville. He was poor, but relatively honest. His first wife was nobody, but his second wifewas a Stilor Nuthen. The Stoney Glares are in town. This numerous family is an ornament to society. Mr. Stoney Glare’s brother also married a Stilor Nuthen, so they are connected by marriage with the Blazé Rounders. We are glad to get ahead of the New York dailies in this sort of news.