Books published by publisher Oxbridge Universal Press (OxUP)

A HOUSE-BOAT on the STYXBy John Kendrick Bangs A century ago, almost every educated English-speaking person would have been aware of John Kendrick Bangs and his unique satirical humor. But over time, Bangs, and others like him, have faded from the public consciousness. This is a pity which this volume hopes to redress. The action of "A House-Boat on the Styx" takes place on the river Styx, which circles Hades. It is important to note that Bangs places the action in Hades, not in Hell, since, unlike the Christian Hell, the Hades of Classical Mythology was not primarily a place of punishment. Rather it was simply the abode of the dead. The book is a collection of twelve interrelated stories, in which it is assumed that various personages from history and mythology are living in Hades. In the first story Charon, the boatman who ferries the shades across the Styx, notices a new vessel on the river. His fears that this very large and luxurious boat will put him out of business are assuaged when he is appointed the boat's doorman and porter. In the eleven humorous stories that follow, there is no central theme; just Bangs' very imaginative conjecture as to what would happen if these historical personages from George Washington to P. T. Barnum, from Confucius to Baron Muenchhausen, from Queen Elizabeth I to Lucretia Borgia, et alii interacted with one another. For example, there is the acrimony felt by Shakespeare for Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, over their teasing "The Swanlet of Avon" as to who really wrote his plays and how he spelled his name. There is the ill-disguised resentment that Columbus feels when Washington gives a birthday party for himself. (Columbus Day was not yet a national holiday.) And, of course, there is the rivalry between Doctor Johnson and just about everybody else in the place. Bangs' humor, however, depended on his reader possessing two things: a liberal education (and its concomitant knowledge of historical personages), and a knowledge of current world events. The problem was how to bring his humor to a generation in which values, especially that of what constitutes a liberal education, have changed so drastically; not to mention the notion of 100 year old "current" events. To address these issues, those entries and personages which need explanation to the modern reader are fully explained in footnotes. With the exception of these footnotes, the text is identical to that of the edition of 1896.