Vanity Fair in Southern Africa 1869-1914 - Sonia Clarke (Brenthurst)

**Limited print of 850 cloth bound copies** 

The weekly magazine Vanity Fair was published in London from 1868 to 1914, and catered specifically for the tastes of high-society Victorians and Edwardians. From early 1869 each issue carried a caricature of a notable person of the day, lithographed in full colour; through the years these reproductions have become collectors items.

The portraits, as well as the often biting or amusing commentaries that accompanied them, provide entertaining glimpses of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book a selection of over eighty caricatures is presented, of characters who were all connected either directly or indirectly with events in what was a turbulent era in southern Africa. Many well-known faces appear, amongst them Cecil Rhodes, Paul Kruger, Bishop Colenso, Winston Churchill, Robert Baden-Powell, Queen Victoria, Cetshwayo, Lord Chelmsford, Barney Barnato, Christiaan de Wet, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Kitchener, Dr Jameson. Equally intriguing, although perhaps lesser-known, are characters such as Anthony Trollope, James Anthony Froude, Florence Dixie, Frank Rhodes, the Prince Imperial, Frederick Selous, Solly Joel, Sir Garnet Wolseley.

Accompanying the caricatures and commentaries is a broad overview of the periods events which sets the characters in their southern African context. What emerges is insight into the aristocratic social, political and military life of Britain and the empire, a reflection of the general snobbery and confidence of the times. By 1914, however, a changing world was emerging, and the high tide of British imperialism was ebbing. Due to the quick and efficient art of photography, the time-consuming caricature was becoming redundant, and Vanity Fair soon found that it could not survive financially.