A Good Recommendation
In 1894, Harper’s Bazaar was touted as a weekly "repository of fashion, pleasure, and instruction" aimed at an upper class female readership. Tucked in the humor pages of the March 17, 1894, edition, Arthur B. Frost’s comic illustration of one of the troubles of running a household would have resonated with the magazine’s target audience. The drawing entitled A Good Recommendation ran above a text imagining the conversation between the two women pictured in the drawing. It read:
Lady (to the applicant). "I am afraid you will hardly suit me. In fact, I don’t intend to engage another Irish girl."
Katie. "Ah me, ma’am, I’m not Irish at all, at all. Indade, it’s half the toime I’m taken for an American lady."
The Moroccan tea table, dainty tea service, fainting couch, and Windsor armchair all denote the leisured woman’s genteel status. Readers of Harper’s Bazaar would laugh knowingly at her dismissal of the garishly dressed housekeeping applicant and her failed attempt to disguise her accent.
