The Serio-comic Governess: With a Chapter From English Humorists of To-day by J. A. Hammerton

By Israel Zangwill and J. A. Hammerton

“The Serio-Comic Governess” is a 1923 short story by British author Israel Zangwill (1864–1926). Zangwill was a leading figure in cultural Zionism during the 19th century, as well as close friend of father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. In later life, he renounced the seeking of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. A notable portion of Zangwill's work concentrated on ghetto life and earned him the nickname "the Dickens of the Ghetto". Highly recommended for lovers of the short story form and not to be missed by fans of Zangwill's masterful work. This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter from “English Humourists of To-Day” by J. A. Hammerton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read & Co. Books
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528790079

Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was a British writer. Born in London, Zangwill was raised in a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Alongside his brother Louis, a novelist, Zangwill was educated at the Jews’ Free School in Spitalfields, where he studied secular and religious subjects. He excelled early on and was made a teacher in his teens before studying for his BA at the University of London. After graduating in 1884, Zangwill began publishing under various pseudonyms, finding editing work with Ariel and The London Puck to support himself. His first novel, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of Peculiar People (1892), was published to popular and critical acclaim, earning praise from prominent Victorian novelist George Gissing. His play The Melting Pot (1908) was a resounding success in the United States and was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as “among the very strong and real influences upon [his] thought and [his] life.” He spent his life in dedication to various political and social causes. An early Zionist and follower of Theodor Herzl, he later withdrew his support in favor of territorialism after he discovered that “Palestine proper has already its inhabitants.” Despite distancing himself from the Zionist community, he continued to advocate on behalf of the Jewish people and to promote the ideals of feminism alongside his wife Edith Ayrton, a prominent author and activist.

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THE

SERIO-COMIC

GOVERNESS

WITH A CHAPTER FROM

English Humorists of To-day

BY J. A. Hammerton

By

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

First published in 1923

This edition published by Read Books Ltd.

Copyright © 2019 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

Contents

Israel Zangwill

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XXI

Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill

This picture though it is not much

Like Zangwill, is not void of worth

It has one true Zangwillian touch

It looks like nothing else on earth.

Oliver Herford

Confessions of a Caricaturist,

Perhaps some one will suggest that Mr. Israel Zangwill is a humorist only as one whom we loved long since and lost awhile, because of late years — indeed, for more than a decade — little that is entirely humorous has come from his pen. On the other hand, he has never been a humorist who inspires affection: he is somewhat too intellectual for that. There is no novelist who, with greater justice, takes himself and his art more seriously than Mr. Zangwill has done since, in 1892, he wrote that masterpiece of modern fiction, Children of the Ghetto; yet, as he began his literary career as a humorous writer and is beyond question one of our masters of epigrammatic wit and intellectual point—de—vice, he may with sufficient reason be included in any survey of modern humour. Moreover, despite the high and serious purpose of all his later work, his attendant imps of mirth are ever at his elbow, and we find him with welcome frequency acknowledging their presence in the writing of even his soberest stories.

Born to Jewish parents in London forty—three years ago, Mr Zangwill shares the distonction of such celebrities as Napoleon and Wellington in not knowing his birthday. He is aware that the year was 1864, but the day would seem to have been wropt in mystery. He has, however, got over the difficulty by choosing his own birthday, and for this purpose he selected February 14. It is not merely. he says, that St. Valentine's Day is the very day for a novelist, but he has a dog whose pedigree has been more carefully kept than his own, and it bears the name Valentine from having been born on the saint's day, master and dog can celebrate their birthday together. This canine favourite he has thus addressed in verse:

Accept from me these birthday lines—

If every dog must have his dog,

How bless'd to have St.Valentine's!

But, asked on one occasion to give the date of his birthday, Mr.Zangwill replied, expressing his inability to do so, and suggested that the inquirer might select some nice convenient day, a roomy one, on which he would not be jostled by bigger men.

As he is eminently original in his personality as well as in his work, it is not surprising to know that during his boyhood his favourite reading was not found among the conventional classics, but that he loved to rove in the strange realms of fiction created by writers whose names will be found nowhere in the annals of bookland; the fabricators of cheap boy's stories to wit. Yet his scholastic training was eminently respectable, as he was the most successful scholar of his time at the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields, and before he was twenty—one he had graduated B.A. at the London University with triple honours.

J. A. Hammerton

English Humorists of To-day, 1907

THE

SERIO-COMIC

GOVERNESS

I

Nelly O'Neill had her day in those earlier and quieter reaches of the Victorian era when the privilege of microscopic biography was reserved for the great and the criminal classes, and when the Bohemian celebrity (who is perhaps a cross between the two) was permitted to pass—like a magic-lantern slide—from obscurity to oblivion through an illuminated moment.

Thus even her real name has not hitherto leaked out, and to this day the O'Keeffes are unaware of their relative's reputation and believe their one connection with the stage to be a dubious and undesirable consanguinity with O'Keeffe, the actor and fertile farce-writer whose Wild Oats made a sensation at Covent Garden at the end of the eighteenth century. To her many brothers and sisters, Eileen was just the baby, and always remained so, even in the eyes of the eminent civil engineer who was only her senior by a year. Among the peasantry—subtly prescient of her freakish destinies—she was dubbed a fairy child: which was by no means a compliment. A bad uncanny creature for all the colleen's winsome looks. The later London whispers of a royal origin had a travestied germ of truth in her father's legendary descent from Brian Boru. He himself seemed scarcely less legendary, this highly coloured squire of the old Irish school, surviving into the Victorian era, like a Georgian caricature; still inhabiting a turreted castle romantically out of repair, infested with ragged parasites: still believing in high living and deep drinking: still receiving the reverence if not the rent of a feudal tenantry, and the affection of a horsey and bibulous countryside. When in liquor there was nothing the O'Keeffe might not do except pay off his mortgages. He looked like an elephant when he put his trousers on wrong—you know elephants have their knees the wrong way, Eileen once told the public in a patter-song. She did not tell the public it was her father, but like a true artist she learned in suffering what she taught in song. One of her childish memories was to be stood in a row of brothers and sisters against a background of antlers, fishing-rods, and racing prints, and solemnly sworn at for innumerability by a ruddy-faced giant in a slovenly surtout. Bad luck to ye, ye gomerals, make up your minds whether ye're nine or eleven, he would say. A man ought to know the size of his family: Mother in heaven, I never thought mine was half so large! These attempts to take a census of his children generally occurred after a peasant had brought him up the drive—hat in one hand, and Squire in the other, as the patter-song had it. At the moment of assisted entry his paternal dignity was always at its stateliest, and it was not till he had gravely hung his cocked hat upon an imaginary door-peg in the middle of the hall and seen it flop floorward that he lost his calm. Blood and 'ouns, ye've the door taken away again.

Sometimes—though this was scarcely a relief—another befuddled gentleman would be left at the uninhabited lodge in his stead. That was chiefly after hunt dinners or card and claret parties, when a new coachman would take a quartet of gentry home, all clouded as to their identities. Arrah now! they've got thimselves mixed! let thim sort thimselves. And the coachman would grab at the nearest limb, extricate it and its belongings from the tangle, and prop the total mass against the first gate he passed. And so with the rest.

Eileen's mother, who was as remarkable for her microscopic piety as for the beauty untarnished by a copious maternity, figured in the child's memories as a stout saint who moved with a rustle of silken skirts and heaved an opulent black silk bosom relieved by a silver cross.

Who are you? her spouse would inquire with an oath.

It's your wife I am, Bagenal dear, she would reply cheerfully. For she had grown up in the four-bottle tradition, and intoxication appeared as natural for