The Wasp — 1881 — page 33: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This page contains two distinct pieces: **"Princess Bah-Tom"** is a humorous narrative poem about a rough character named Pat from New York who visits a woman named McBride. The illustrations show slapstick chaos—overturned furniture, police intervention. The satire appears to mock working-class Irish immigrant behavior and dialect humor common to 19th-century American comedy. **"Our Lodging House"** is a prose article praising San Francisco's lodging houses as cosmopolitan spaces where diverse nationalities (British, German, Irish, Italian) mingle and debate freely. It presents these boarding houses as democratic institutions enabling intellectual exchange and democratic equality among residents from different backgrounds—a somewhat romanticized view of immigrant urban life. Both pieces reflect period attitudes toward immigration and class.