Satire
The School for Wives
In 1661 and 1662 Moliere presented the plays The School for Husbands and then The School for Wives (this one). "The central situations …
Mornings at Bow Street
This is a collection of various articles found in Morning Herald columns. Some are found interesting, some may be hilarious! The 84 pieces o…
The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in po…
Erewhon
Erewhon is a thought-provoking novel by Samuel Butler that invites readers into a fictional land where the absurdities of Victorian society …
Ginx's Baby
In the second half of the 19th century, London was becoming a wealthy, industrialized city. It attracted many working class people from near…
Behind the Beyond
Behind the Beyond is a witty collection of parodies and humorous anecdotes from renowned Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. In this engaging…
The Country Wife
One of the most notorious Restoration comedies in existence, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife is a lively and riotous exploration of cou…
Mary Broome
Before Downton Abbey, there was Mary Broome. In Allan Monkhouse's 1911 satire, when the son of a middle-class household gets their housemaid…
The Sincere Huron
L'Ingénu is a satirical novella by the French writer Voltaire, published in 1767. It tells the story of a Huron Indian transported to…
The Battle of the Books
"The Battle of the Books" depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library (housed in St James's Palace at the time of…
Lucian's Dialogues
Dialogues of the Dead are 30 miniature dialogues mocking the Homeric conception of the Greek gods, originally written in Attic Greek by Syri…
The Bourgeois Gentleman
The Bourgeois Gentleman of the title is a middle-class social climber, assured that by learning all the arts of a true and noble gentleman, …
Das Wachsfigurenkabinett
Auf einem Nürnberger Jahrmarkt wird in einem Wachsfigurenkabinett mit beweglichen mechanischen Figuren das »Leiden und Sterben un…
Nightmare Abbey
Deep in the fens of the British coast sits the gloomy mansion that goes by the name Nightmare Abbey. It is inhabited by persons of very low …
The Miser
The Miser is a comedy of manners about a rich moneylender named Harpagon. His feisty children long to escape from his penny-pinching househo…
The Inheritance
"As the noblest attribute of man, family pride had been cherished time immemorial by the noble race of Rossville. Deep and incurable, t…
The Acharnians
Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premi…
Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in th…
The House with the Green Shutters
The House with the Green Shutters is a novel by the Scottish writer George Douglas Brown, first published in 1901 by John MacQueen. Set in m…
Curiosities of Street Literature
This is a collection of broadsides from London. Broadsides are short, popular publications, a precursor to today's tabloid journalism. The c…