Life, 1915-09-23 · page 29 of 48
Life — September 23, 1915 — page 29: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Cartoon:** "The Ploughman Homeward Plods His Weary Way" depicts a rural scene with a horse-drawn plow, illustrating honest agricultural labor. **Middle Joke:** A widower explains turning his wife's portrait to the wall isn't disrespectful—he spent most home time buttoning up her dress, so facing the wall seems natural. This is a mildly risqué joke about marital duties, typical of early 20th-century humor. **"Abreast with the Times":** A cluttered illustration of tangled, overstuffed newspapers—satirizing how newspapers present excessive information. **"Our Literary Literature":** Satire of self-referential literary criticism. The piece mocks a chain of literary critics writing about other critics writing about famous authors (Wells, France, Bennett). It questions who these secondary critics are and proposes an infinite regress where each critic gets written about by another—poking fun at literary establishment navel-gazing. **Boston Section:** Satirizes the *Boston Evening Transcript's* practice of printing tiny headlines over important news, suggesting Bostonians pride themselves on intellectual sophistication in extracting meaning from minimal information.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
'RIEND: I sce you have turned your wife's picture to the wall. Isn’t that rather disrespectful? Wivower: No; it seems more natural. You see, most | of my time at home I spent in buttoning her up the back. ABREAST WITH THE TIMES” “The ploughman homeward plods his weary way” Our Literary Literature N recent literary columns we notice that Mr. H. G. Wells has been analyzed, described, depicted and otherwise written up by Mr. J. D. Beresford; that the same thing has been done to Mr. Anatole France and Arnold Bennett by Mr. W. L. George and Mr. y Darton, spectively, But who are Messrs. J. D. Beresford, W. George and F, J. Harvey Darton? Are they distinguished literary lights? We demand that somebody write them up and tell why they are writing up Messrs. Wells, France and Bennett. After this has been done, then we shall expect to have somebody else write up the somebody who has written up the three who have written up Wells, France and Bennett. “YOUR true Bostonian takes pride in the fact that his Evening Transcript puts the smallest head-lines over the most interesting news—and that he knows how to find the most interesting news under the smallest head-lines. This is the true Bostonian’s notion of the pragmatic value of the highest education, comicbooks.com