Beerbohm Scrapbooks

The collection consists of two scrapbooks of caricatures of poets created and extended out of the published version, Max Beerbohm, The poets' corner (London, Heinemann 1904) and A book of caricatures (London, Methuen 1907). Numerous newspaper cuttings and newspaper illustrations of broadcasts and cartoons from the 1920s-1950s have been inserted throughout the volumes in addition to the printed caricatures. In particular, these have been taken from The Listener. There is no indication of who carried out this work.

Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872-1956), knight, author and cartoonist, was born in London, son of Julius and Eliza Beerbohm. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Merton College, Oxford, where he read classics. He began a career as a professional caricaturist when he was twenty, and was first published in the Strand magazine in 1892. His first public showing was at the Fine Art’s Society exhibition in 1896, in ‘A century and a half of English humorous art, from Hogarth to the present day’. He also worked with great success as a freelance writer and essayist, and contributed as drama critic to the Saturday Review between 1898-1910. He completed one novel, Zuleika Dobson, which was published in 1911. He married the American actress Florence Kahn in 1910, after which the couple settled in Italy. In the 1930s he also became interested in broadcasting, and made a series of programmes for the BBC. He was knighted in 1939, and married his second wife, Elisabeth Jungmann, in 1956.

Usual EUL arrangements apply.

Biographical information taken from The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (1996) and the Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

Not currently listed.

Description compiled by Charlotte Berry, Archivist, 10 March 2005, and encoded by Karen Atkinson into EAD on 2 June 2005.

Usual EUL restrictions apply.

Transferred from the Reserve Collection in 2003.

UCLA: Special Collections Department and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; Oxford University: Merton College Library; Harvard University: Houghton Library; Yale Universities Library: Beinecke Library; British Library: Manuscript Collections; Cambridge University Library: Dept. of Manuscripts and University Archives; Oxford University: Bodleian Library, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts; Leeds University Library: Special Collections; University of Texas at Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Library; Glasgow University Library: Special Collections Department; The National Archives; Cambridge University: Churchill Archives Centre; Edinburgh University Library: Special Collections; New York Public Library; University of San Francisco Library; Princeton University Library; Indian University: Lilly Library.

It is not known whether this collection has been used as the basis for publication.