The Project Gutenberg eBook, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July
19, 1890, by Various, Edited by F. C. Burnand

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Title: Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890

Author: Various

Release Date: April 6, 2004 [eBook #11919]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI,
VOL. 99, JULY 19, 1890***

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PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI

VOL. 99

JULY 19, 1890

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

[Illustration: PARALLEL.

Joe, the Fat Boy in Pickwick, startles the Old Lady; Oscar, the Fad
Boy in Lippincott's, startles Mrs. Grundy.

_Oscar, the Fad Boy_. "I want to make your flesh creep!"]

The Baron has read OSCAR WILDE'S Wildest and Oscarest work, called
_Dorian Gray_, a weird sensational romance, complete in one number of
_Lippincott's Magazine_. The Baron, recommends anybody who revels in
_diablerie_, to begin it about half-past ten, and to finish it at one
sitting up; but those who do not so revel he advises either not to
read it at all, or to choose the daytime, and take it in homoeopathic
doses. The portrait represents the soul of the beautiful Ganymede-like
_Dorian Gray_, whose youth and beauty last to the end, while his soul,
like JOHN BROWN'S, "goes marching on" into the Wilderness of Sin. It
becomes at last a devilled soul. And then _Dorian_ sticks a knife into
it, as any ordinary mortal might do, and a fork also, and next morning

"Lifeless but 'hideous' he lay,"

while the portrait has recovered the perfect beauty which it possessed
when it first left the artist's easel. If OSCAR intended an allegory,
the finish is dreadfully wrong. Does he mean that, by sacrificing
his earthly life, _Dorian Gray_ atones for his infer