Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8

Word count: 71K words
Chapters: 8

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Sep 11, 2007

Editor's review

This is a public-domain electronic text of the February 11, 1914 issue of Punch, the famous British humor and satire magazine, and is a periodical publication. Its value lies not in systematic argument but in offering a specific snapshot of public humor, cartoon captions, and social topics, useful for understanding what British urban readers noticed and joked about on the eve of World War I. Read it with historical awareness: many jokes depend on then-current political figures, advertising culture, and local references, so they can feel remote today; precisely for that reason, it has value as source material for social history, press history, and humor studies. The electronic edition makes keyword searching easy and suits excerpting and classroom examples rather than cover-to-cover reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Scholars studying British press history, humor magazines, and popular culture
History-minded readers interested in British social atmosphere on the eve of World War I
Teachers who need excerpts of English humorous texts for class or writing
General English-language readers who enjoy old periodical layouts and short jokes

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a coherent long narrative or complete stories
Beginners unfamiliar with early 20th-century Britain who may find the jokes obscure
Newcomers who need modern annotations and background commentary

Reading tips

Start with the table of contents and section titles, then dip into jokes or cartoon captions.
Look up references to people and places as you go, noting the political and cultural context of the time.
Excerpt by section and compare differences in humor techniques across parts of the magazine.
No need to read the whole issue; use it as a searchable collection of historical fragments.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

What kind of publication is Punch?

Punch was a famous British humor and satire magazine of the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly featuring cartoons, short jokes, satirical verse, and social commentary, often joking about politics and everyday topics. This issue is from February 1914 and is one slice of the magazine's long publishing history.

Can I understand it without historical background?

Some short jokes can be understood on their own, but much of the content depends on political figures, advertising language, and local allusions of the time. It is best to look up keywords as you read and treat it as an entry point into British public topics of the 1910s, not a casual read to be fully understood in one go.

Is it suitable for learning English?

It can serve as extensive reading material for intermediate to advanced English readers, offering exposure to early 20th-century periodical language and humor. But the text contains many period-specific puns and slang, so it is not very suitable for beginners or exam-focused study; use it with annotations or a guide.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.