Bonus Images

 As an encore we are pleased to present several bonus images of postcards selected from the Richards collection.  These comic novelty cards, most, including men in the guise of women, are contemporaneous with our featured images of vaudeville and music hall stars.

English novelist and critic George Orwell described these popular but often misogynistic joke cards - 'Countless postcards show draggled hags of the stage charwoman type exchanging "unladylike" abuse. Typical repartee: "I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon!"’. - George Orwell, 'The art of Donald McGill', Horizon, 4 (21), September 1941.

Untitled, London: The Fancy Dress Studio, [n.d.]. Studio portrait of two women in men’s evening attire