Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914

The great British satirical magazine captured here in its penultimate issue before the Great War begins. This March 1914 number finds the editors gleefully dismantling the year's preoccupations: suffragettes disrupting Parliament, the absurd rituals of after-dinner oratory, and a spectacularly doomed department store shopping expedition. The wit is immaculate, the drawings delicious, and there's something uniquely poignant about laughing at 1914's anxieties when we know what's coming in August. The class tensions, the first rumblings of feminist rebellion, the nervous energy of a civilization convinced of its own permanence. This is a time capsule that still feels dangerously alive.