More Peers : Verses

This lively collection of comic verse turns the British peerage into a gallery of absurd personalities. Earls, barons, and heirs face electioneering, medical advice, horses, electric lights, newspapers, gambling, and the tiresome demands of public office—with consequences that are often sudden, ridiculous, and delightfully self-inflicted.

The poems are built around quick rhymes, playful exaggeration, and a sharp eye for social pretension. One lord strains his voice defending a political cause, another argues against bishops in Parliament, while others discover that wealth, rank, and confidence offer little protection from bad luck or common sense.

Designed to be enjoyed aloud, these sketches have a buoyant rhythm and a distinctly theatrical sense of timing. Witty illustrations accompany the verses, adding to the book’s caricatured portrait of aristocratic life and its gentle—but unmistakable—mockery of privilege, politics, and fashionable foolishness.