Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2

Word count: 67K words
Chapters: 7

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. 150, February 23, 1916 by Various. Author: Various. Language: English. Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals. Release Date: Sep 21, 2007

Editor's review

This is the electronic edition of the February 23, 1916 issue of Punch, the long-running British satirical weekly—an original publication from the First World War. Its value lies not in continuous narrative but in firsthand access to wartime British social mood, humor, and advertising culture: cartoons, short commentaries, jokes, and reader-contribution columns interweave, offering jibes at the war alongside satire of everyday trifles. For readers studying the social history of WWI, the history of the British press, or humorous literature, this is a citable primary source; for general readers, it is more like a window onto an era, conveying the page-level pleasures of a century ago. Read it as if leafing through an old magazine rather than plowing straight through; skip between sections and note the interplay between cartoons and commentaries. As a historical publication, some jokes depend on period context and personal references, which may feel remote to today's readers—precisely where annotation and background knowledge are needed.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying British society and press history during WWI
Readers interested in English satirical cartoons and humorous prose
Students needing primary sources for coursework or writing material

Not a good fit for

General readers expecting a complete story or continuous narrative
English beginners unfamiliar with the historical context and unwilling to look up background

Reading tips

Read by section: start with cartoons and short commentaries, then pick joke passages of interest
Consult a WWI timeline to understand the context and limits of wartime humor
Excerpt typical advertisements and cartoons as material for press history or cultural studies

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

Is this a book or a magazine issue?

It is the electronic edition of a magazine issue—the February 23, 1916 issue of Punch—containing cartoons, short commentaries, jokes, and advertisements. It is not a continuous long-form work.

Can I read it without knowing WWI background?

You can, but some jokes and cartoons depend on wartime context and period references, so understanding will suffer. It is best to learn the basic background of Britain in WWI first; reading will then go much more smoothly.

Is it suitable as English-learning material?

It suits intermediate to advanced English readers. The text contains much period colloquialism, puns, and satire; the language is lively but the contextual threshold is high, so use annotations or background materials.

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.