Item 49: "Improved" copy of A Christmas Garland (1913)

Julie Carlsen: This special copy of the Christmas Garland is an example of Max Beerbohm’s wartime charity. He drew caricatures in it so that it would help raise money for the Red Cross during World War I. I am about to play for you a recording of Max Beerbohm’s voice, which demonstrates another instance of his wartime charity. Though this piece, called London Revisited, is a rerecording done later, Max first read it during World War II for the BBC.

Max Beerbohm: One of the greatest of Englishmen said that the man who is tired of London is tired of life. Well, Dr. Johnson had a way of being right, but he had a way of being wrong, too; otherwise we shouldn't love him so much.

And I think that a man who is tired of London may merely be tired of life in London. He won’t certainly feel any such fatigue if he was born and bred in a distant county and came to London and beheld London only when he had reached maturity. Almost all the impassioned lovers of London have spent, like Dr. Johnson, their childhood and adolescence in the country.

Such was not my own fate. I was born within the sound of Bow Bells. I am, in fact, a genuine Cockney, as you will already have guessed from my accent. Before I was able to speak or think, my eyes must have been familiar with the endless vistas of streets, countless people passing by without a glance at the dear little fellow in the perambulator.

Any number of cart horses drawing carts, cab horses drawing cabs, carriage horses drawing carriages through the more or less smoke-laden atmosphere. I was smoke-dried before I could reason and prattle. For me, there never was the great apocalyptic moment of initiation into the fabulous metropolis. I never said, “So this is London.”