The Happy Hypocrite (Colour Illustrated Edition)

From its magnificent first sentence, “None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell…” The Happy Hypocrite exerts a hypnotizing charm. Sir Max Beerbohm’s ‘fairy tale for tired men’ is one of the pinnacles of 1890s chic and elegance. His famously rich style, laced with equal parts of tenderness and severity, serves up a story of love, and, more importantly, what we will do for it. George Hell’s life as a Regency buck is turned upside down when Jenny Mere, a dancer, arrives in his life. It only remains for him to live up to the pure expectations of this lowly girl. Will he succeed, or will his old wicked habits die hard? Will the world let him forget them? He decides that certain extraordinary measures are necessary to achieve this lofty aim, but never guesses just how much power his love has – and is miraculously transformed. First published in Volume XI of the legendary Yellow Book in 1896, this beautiful fable crowned Beerbohm’s reputation as a weaver of glorious fabrics of prose. This edition reproduces George Sheringham’s splendid illustrations, first seen in the edition of 1915. Born in 1872, Max Beerbohm was a regular contributor to magazines, a playwright, a novelist and, crucially, an essayist and caricaturist. He married Florence Kahn in 1910; they moved to Rapallo in Italy and stayed there, apart from the periods of the two world wars, for the rest of their lives. Knighted in 1939, Sir Max died in 1956.