Pictures of People — Story, Setting & Ideas

Women as Targets and Butts

The catalog subject "Women -- Caricatures and cartoons" is amply justified. Gibson's women are often the punchline, as in "Her Nightmare" ("How she saw herself") or the widow who cannot see past her own loss. In one exchange, a "sympathetic plain friend" tells the widow how her late husband "stopped and spoke to me with such a sunny greeting," only to have the widow reply that he "could find something pleasant to say" to any woman, no matter how "humble or homely." The joke is on the friend, but the widow's self-absorption is the real target. Elsewhere, "The Leading Features of a Liberal Education" and "Yale versus Vassar" suggest that women's education is a subject for satire.

Social Rituals and Their Discontents

Many drawings take aim at the rituals of courtship, marriage, and mourning. "After the Quarrel" and "Reading the Will" hint at domestic strife, while "Extract from the Will" includes a clause cutting off a widow's inheritance if she remarries. The one-liner for "A Little Story"—"By a sleeve"—is cryptic, but the doctor's mix-up of a note and a prescription ("Great Scott! I thought it was a prescription and made it up for her") shows how easily social transactions go awry. The setting of "In a London Theatre" and "At the Royal Academy" (where a painting is "Skied!") extends the satire to the art world.

The Limits of the Excerpts: What We Cannot See

Because the excerpts consist almost entirely of captions and titles, the visual component—Gibson's drawings—is absent. The catalog subject "Drawing, American" is thus only partially represented. We cannot assess the style, composition, or expressiveness of the images, which were the main draw for contemporary audiences. Similarly, the sequence of drawings is unclear; the list of titles may not reflect the book's actual order. The humor, while evident in the captions, may depend on visual cues we lack. The dedication "To a Big American Girl" and the inclusion of Parisian scenes ("Moulin Rouge," "Le Chat Noir") suggest a transatlantic perspective, but without the drawings, the full effect is lost.

Readers should approach Pictures of People as a period piece whose humor relies on social conventions now over a century old. The captions are often self-contained, making the book easy to dip into, but the drawings are essential to the experience. The Project Gutenberg edition reproduces the text only, so for the full effect, seek out the original illustrated version. Gibson's wit is sharp, but it is also of its time—particularly in its treatment of women and class.

Gibson’s sharp little jokes about courtship made me recall flipping through my grandmother’s old magazines, where every face seemed to hide a wink. That same playful prickliness surfaced again in The Cubies' ABC — Background and Themes, where the satire felt gentler, more like a nursery rhyme that knows it’s being naughty. Both left me smiling alone in the lamplight.