The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

On the Money

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lady satirist of solid literary merit, who has been hustled onto a grateful nation's banknotes as the token female, must be in want of prettying up. A biographer of Jane Austen has protested the Bank of England's choice of image, a doe-eyed Victorian blandness irresistibly suggestive of the fantasy S&M sex life of Iain Duncan Smith. The picture dates from half a century after Austen's death, and is a family-values version of the only known contemporary portrait, an acidulous sketch by Austen's sister Cassandra which was evidently too strong for Threadneedle Street. Given that the country's finances are even now in the chubby hands of some dewlap-rippling Regency fatheads straight out of a Cruikshank print, the use of a Victorian image for a Georgian writer has a particularly delicate irony.

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