Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

Plutoria Avenue: a university that sells its soul for an endowment, two churches that merge for financial reasons, a mystic who fleeces the ladies' lunch club, and a clean-government campaign run by the men it is meant to expose. Leacock ran the economics department at McGill by day and claimed the humour paid better; this 1914 companion to Sunshine Sketches turns the same eye on the rich, and the knife goes in much deeper. Fifty-seven plates by painters from Hogarth to Bellows, all clubs and supper tables and family gatherings, give Leacock's idle rich a visual ancestry stretching back two centuries.