The Project Gutenberg EBook of Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99,
October 4, 1890, by Various

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Title: Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890

Author: Various

Release Date: May 9, 2004 [EBook #12306]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PUNCH ***

Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Punch, or the London Charivari, William
Flis, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

PUNCH,

OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

VOL. 99.

October 4, 1890.

MR. PUNCH'S PRIZE NOVELS.

NEW SERIES.--IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.

This age has been called an Age of Progress, an Age of Reform, an Age
of Intellect, an Age of Shams; everything in fact except an Age of
Prizes. And yet, it is perhaps as an Age of Prizes that it is destined
to be chiefly remembered. The humble but frantic solver of Acrostics
has had his turn, the correct expounder of the law of Hard Cases
has by this time established a complete code of etiquette; the
doll-dresser, the epigram-maker, the teller of witty stories, the
calculator who can discover by an instinct the number of letters in
a given page of print, all have displayed their ingenuity, and have
been magnificently rewarded by prizes varying in value from the mere
publication of their names, up to a policy of life insurance, or a
completely furnished mansion in Peckham Rye. In fact, it has been
calculated by competent actuaries that taking a generation at about
thirty-three years, and making every reasonable allowance for errors
of postage, stoppage _in transitu_, fraudulent bankruptcies and
unauthorised conversions, 120 per cent. of all persons alive in Great
Britain and Ireland in any given day of twenty-four hours, must have
received a prize of some sort.

Novelists, however, have not as yet received a prize of any sort,
at least as novelists. The reproach is about to be removed. A prize
of L1000 has been offered for the best novel by the Editor of a
newspaper. The most distinguished writers are, so it is declared,
entered for the Competition, but only the name of the prize-winner is
to be revealed, only the prize-winning novel is to be published. Such
at