Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Du Maurier, George - Henry James (essay date 1883)

Henry James (essay date 1883)

SOURCE: “George Du Maurier,” in his Partial Portraits, University of Michigan Press, 1970, pp. 327-72.

[In the following excerpt from an essay originally written in 1883, James provides an extensive examination of Du Maurier's contributions to Punch, with particular attention to his characterization of the English and French people.]

… Punch, for the last fifteen years, has been, artistically speaking, George du Maurier. (We ought, perhaps, before this, to have said that none of our observations are to be taken as applying to the letterpress of the comic journal, which has probably never been fully appreciated in America.) It has employed other talents than his—notably Charles Keene, who is as broad, as jovial, as English (half his jokes are against Scotchmen) as Leech, but whose sense of the beautiful, the delicate, is inferior even to Leech's. But for a great many people, certainly in...

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