English Humour

By J. B. Priestley

Stein & Day, 1976, 207 pages

Hardcover with dust jacket. Ex library with associated stamps on front endpaper. Dust jacket is worn and aged. Cover slightly worn and ages. Pages aged but otherwise very good. Other than stamps, no markings found. A sample of pages is shown in photos. All pages are present. Images are of the actual item for sale.

Includes:

• Our First Great Humorist
• After the Puritans
• The Facetious and the Funny
• Edwardian Contrasts
• English Comic Art

NYT review by Auberon Waugh in 1976:
"...he has given us the gloomiest book on humor I have read for a long time. In the words of Surtees (a writer he despises) it is “hellish dark and smells of cheese.” But its function, as a personal anthology and roll call of nearly all the great names in English literature from Chaucer through the Elizabethans and the Jacobeans, the Restoration, then Gay, Fielding, Austen, Sterne, Johnson, Peacock, Lamb, Dickens, Trollope, Wells, Shaw, Chesterton, Belloc to the present day is to remind us that if one makes a detour to avoid the Romantics and another to avoid Lawrence and the later stages of the Modern Movement, nearly all are humorists. The book will prove useful enough if it reminds a few people that once they have taken the humor out of English literature there is very little left..."