The Happy Hypocrite (Colour Illustrated Edition) by Max Beerbohm

The Happy Hypocrite (Colour Illustrated Edition) by Max Beerbohm

From its magnificent first sentence, None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell. The Happy Hypocrite exerts a hypnotizing charm. Sir Max Beerbohm's 'fairy tale for tired men' is one of the pinnacles of 1890s chic and elegance. His famously rich style, laced with equal parts of tenderness and severity, serves up a story of love, and, more importantly, what we will do for it. George Hell's life as a Regency buck is turned upside down when Jenny Mere, a dancer, arrives in his life. It only remains for him to live up to the pure expectations of this lowly girl. Will he succeed, or will his old wicked habits die hard? Will the world let him forget them? He decides that certain extraordinary measures are necessary to achieve this lofty aim, but never guesses just how much power his love has - and is miraculously transformed. First published in Volume XI of the legendary Yellow Book in 1896, this beautiful fable crowned Beerbohm's reputation as a weaver of glorious fabrics of prose. This edition reproduces George Sheringham's splendid illustrations, first seen in the edition of 1915. Born in 1872, Max Beerbohm was a regular contributor to magazines, a playwright, a novelist and, crucially, an essayist and caricaturist. He married Florence Kahn in 1910; they moved to Rapallo in Italy and stayed there, apart from the periods of the two world wars, for the rest of their lives. Knighted in 1939, Sir Max died in 1956.

Sir Henry Maximilian Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was the youngest of nine children born in London to well-to-do Lithuanian immigrants. As a boy he showed no propensity for writing or artwork, but despite the lack of formal training, upon entering Merton College, Oxford, he quickly became known for his essays and caricatures (and for being a dandy). When The Strand Magazine published thirty-six of his drawings in 1892, his career took off, and he left school without a degree. (Oxford would later give him an honorary degree.) He went to America briefly, to write press releases for his brother's theatrical company, then returned to England and wrote essays and drew caricatures for his friend Aubrey Beardsley's The Yellow Book magazine, among other publications. Some of his work around this time concerned the trial of Oscar Wilde, whom he'd befriended while a student. The trial, particularly Wilde's defense of the love that dare not speak its name, moved him greatly. In 1896, he published his first book, a collection of his essays called The Works of Max Beerbohm, and the first of many collections of his caricatures, Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen. Two years later he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review, a position he retained until 1910, when he married American actress Florence Kahn (Evelyn Waugh speculated it was a mariage blanc), and moved to a house overlooking the Mediterranean in Rapallo, Italy. Despite Florence's death, in 1951, and despite becoming popular in England as a BBC commentator, Beerbohm would remain in Italy until his own death, decades later at age eighty-three, just after marrying his former secretary and companion, Elisabeth Jungmann.

Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics and Jane Eyre: A Reader's Guide 
to Criticism.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780987367808
ISBN 10	0987367803
Title	The Happy Hypocrite (Colour Illustrated Edition)
Author	Max Beerbohm
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Michael Walmer
Year published	2023-02-01
Number of pages	128
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.