Dreams and Wonders by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486120805
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922)

THE USE OF humor in fantasy, especially through satire, was a feature used as far back as Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), and, of course, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Fantastic humor took a giant leap forward in the Alice books by Lewis Carroll and the various nonsense rhymes by Edward Lear, and with growing sophistication it was incorporated in adult fiction by writers such as W. S. Gilbert, Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton, and the next two authors in this anthology, John Kendrick Bangs and F. Anstey.

Bangs was a regular contributor to and assistant editor of Life, Harper’s Bazaar and, later, full editor of Harper’s Weekly and Puck. He was a noted humorist and parodist, starting with New Waggings for Old Tales (1888). He found fantasy and the supernatural an especially good field for his humor which he used to great effect in “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” (1891), Over the Plum Pudding (1901), Alice in Blunderland (1907), and his best known books, A House-Boat on the Styx (1895) and its sequels, The Pursuit of the House-Boat (1897) and The Enchanted Typewriter (1899). In this final sequence he used characters from throughout history who are trapped in the after-life and consider the state of the world as it was in Bangs’s day. Alas, humor can be a fickle thing, easily dated. Although he was highly popular in his day, few people read Bangs today except for his ghost stories. The best parts of the House-Boat sequence are those that don’t rely on parody, but create a scene of general amusement. That is how the book begins, with Charon, the overworked boatman of the Styx, who ferries the souls of the dead to Hades. He is suddenly confronted by a newly established committee of souls and their great plans.

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