As You've Never Seen Him

This playful photograph (originally a bromide print) is titled 'Max - With apologies to all concerned'. Showing Max Beerbohm in 1916, parodically posed as Whister's Thomas Carlyle, it was taken by Filson Young, better known as a writer and journalist, among many other things. I came across it in the Introduction to a splendid volume of Max Beerbohm Caricatures (Yale University Press, 1997) that I picked up for a song at one of my regular charity shops. No fewer than 213 caricatures, with plentiful quotations from Max as well as useful commentary by one N. John Hall, an American academic - this is a book that is clearly going to give me a lot of pleasure. As did the wholly unexpected image of Max as Carlyle.