The Wasp, 1913 · page 13 of 364
The Wasp — 1913 — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains no cartoon—it's a biographical narrative about James Burnham, son of Sir Walter Burnham. The text recounts Burnham's scandalous behavior: striking a schoolmaster, assaulting an Oxford proctor, seducing a tailor's daughter in Wantage, then shooting at a rival admirer (who happened to be a magistrate and his uncle), and finally being held up by a highwayman while fleeing to London. The satire targets a young aristocratic male who possesses his family's "courage" and "dangerous temper" but lacks their sense of honor. The piece mocks how dangerous privilege without restraint becomes—a cautionary tale about dissolute gentry. The detailed recounting of escalating misdeeds suggests contemporary scandal-sheet humor.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
12 THE WASP even farther than this; and the crest of the Burn- hams of Burnham, a conventional griffin, was tat- tooed just beneath the left shoulder blade of each of his four sons and of his one daughter. All the sons of Sir Walter Burnham promised well and rode straight except James. James pos- sessed the courage of his race and its dangerous temper, but he lacked the nice sense of honor that had ballasted the men of his family through stormy centuries. He went to school and felled one of his masters with a book; he went up to Oxford, with a view to studying for the church, and laid a proctor low with a cudgel; he had.a tender affair with the daughter of the tailor of Wantage, and first brought it to the ears of the public by discharging a pistol, with- out warning, at another of the lady’s admirers—an admirer who unfortunately happened to be a magis- trate and his own uncle on his mother’s side. He fled to London after this performance, but on his way was held up by a man ina mask. Thanks to his courage and swiftness, he overcame the gen- Comichooks.com