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Three Courses and a Dessert
Three Courses and a Desser t is a collection of humorous short stories with West Country, Irish, and legal settings (the "three courses") together with a more miscellaneous selection (the "dessert"). First published in 1830, it is richly illustrated by the author in a style familiar to readers of Oliver Twist, and includes a varied cast of characters who come vividly to life in the mind of the reader. These stories represent Cruikshank’s biting satire at its best. Sometimes scandalous but always humorous, these stories are sure to delight a modern audience able to see in its allegories and allusions plenty that is still relevant to the social and political scene of today.
443 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1830
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About the author
William Clarke
212 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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March 29, 2015
The author of this book is not George Cruikshank but William Clarke. Cruikshank (later Dickens's illustrator) did the pictures.
The book's three courses are suites of West Country tales, legal tales and Irish bulls; the dessert is a miscellany of sketches. Set in 1830, Clarke's collection looks back to an England of landowner-magistrates and volunteer associations, rather than forward to post-Reform England. While taking an eighteenth-century relish in frankness, even cruelty, his tone is more often affectionately satirical, poking fun at baronets or justices who are already antiquarian figures: public-spirited men made laughable by their mania and attachment to the old ways. Only a handful of the stories are well- or vigorously-conceived as tales. In the most evocative, a man who bested the squire to win the hand of a woman twenty years earlier is caught by his gamekeeper poaching a pheasant and kills him with the keeper's own buss. Believing his own child and that of the landowner to have been swapped at birth, to give his own boy a better life, he puts on his 'son's' shoes to incriminate the changeling and save himself. But did the swap actually take place?
The local colour in these tales is abundant. If they fall short, it's in the quality of narrative inspiration. Clarke's sketches can be rewardingly read by scholars of the judiciary, Army, West Country and pre-Reform England, and of the ghostly and the folktale.
The book's three courses are suites of West Country tales, legal tales and Irish bulls; the dessert is a miscellany of sketches. Set in 1830, Clarke's collection looks back to an England of landowner-magistrates and volunteer associations, rather than forward to post-Reform England. While taking an eighteenth-century relish in frankness, even cruelty, his tone is more often affectionately satirical, poking fun at baronets or justices who are already antiquarian figures: public-spirited men made laughable by their mania and attachment to the old ways. Only a handful of the stories are well- or vigorously-conceived as tales. In the most evocative, a man who bested the squire to win the hand of a woman twenty years earlier is caught by his gamekeeper poaching a pheasant and kills him with the keeper's own buss. Believing his own child and that of the landowner to have been swapped at birth, to give his own boy a better life, he puts on his 'son's' shoes to incriminate the changeling and save himself. But did the swap actually take place?
The local colour in these tales is abundant. If they fall short, it's in the quality of narrative inspiration. Clarke's sketches can be rewardingly read by scholars of the judiciary, Army, West Country and pre-Reform England, and of the ghostly and the folktale.
Displaying 1 of 1 review