A Long-felt Want.

Punch, March 4, 1903

 

A Long-felt Want. — Sir Howard Vincent will be greatly obliged if the author of The Unspeakable Scot will kindly publish at his earliest convenience another of his comprehensive criticisms, this time under the tide of The Abominable Alien, or, say, The Perfectly Pestilential Pole.

 

                               

 

Unsigned paragraph as printed; entered by Wodehouse in “Money Received for Literary Work.”

 

Note:

 

P.G.’s earliest forays into the world of British politics began gently, in Punch, with punning references to a few current events. ‘England,’ British journalist T. W. H. Crosland wrote in his 1902 book The Unspeakable Scot, was ‘a Scot-ridden country’ and complained that there were far too many of them in journalism, in politics, in commerce and banking and that the time had come ‘for the Scotchman to be taught his place.’ ‘Scot-baiting’ reached its pinnacle of unpleasantness with Crosland’s book. C. E. Howard Vincent was a Conservative Party politician and a leading and vocal opponent of ‘Alien immigration.’

 

John Dawson