The Wasp, 1918 · page 208 of 330
The Wasp — 1918 — page 208: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This appears to be Chapter XIII from a serialized narrative in *The Wasp*, not a political cartoon. The text is prose fiction concerning Alexander Burnham, a character dealing with family shame on the island of Nevis. The passage describes Burnham's emotional distress after his brother James's dishonesty becomes publicly known. The satire lies in depicting how Burnham's acute "family pride" causes him greater suffering from *public knowledge* of the scandal than from the wrongdoing itself—a commentary on Victorian social pretension and the disproportion between private guilt and public reputation. His paranoid response (scrutinizing messmates' words and glances for evidence of their knowledge) mocks how shame-driven pride becomes self-destructive and illogical. The reference to Elizabeth Nash suggests romantic complications entangled with this social disgrace. Without seeing illustrations, I cannot identify specific caricatures, but the text satirizes the hypocritical values of 19th-century respectability.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
XIII ALEXANDER BurnHAmM kept away from Govern- ment House for several days: Shame made him bitter and suspicious. It was hard enough, he reflected, to know himself that James was a cheat and a thief; but to have others know it made it seem a hundred times more shameful and more hard to bear. This is where he suffered for his acute family . pride. A skeleton in the closet is a depressing possession; but when the door of ‘the closet has been opened to the public gaze the situation becomes worse than depressing. Alexander felt that the door of the Burnham skeleton-closet now stood open to the astonished and eclighted : gaze of the public of Nevis. Being convinced of this fact, he spent all his leisure in looking for proof of it—a foolish and illogical proceeding. He weighed and questioned every word and glance of his messmates and of the gentlemen ashore. He thought of Elizabeth _ Nash in a bitter misery of spirit. That pearly 7 199 2 comichooks.com