Ten parodies of the fiction of 1911: a detective story, a nautical tale, a Russian novel, a ghost story and a romance, each carried to the point where its machinery falls off. Leacock was a professor of political economy at McGill and wrote humour in the mornings before lectures. "Gertrude the Governess" and "Guido the Gimlet of Ghent" are the two that killed their genres, and the jokes have not aged the way parody usually does. Forty-eight plates after Cruikshank and Daumier carry the theatrical, comic and street life of the parodied genres, from Hamlet's ghost to an omnibus interior.
