W. Davenport Adams's Quips and Quiddities (1881) is a commonplace book turned into a pocket-sized anthology, its subtitle promising “a quintessence of quirks, quaint, quizzical, and quotable.” The editor’s preface states plainly that the volume “does not even aspire to be read consecutively” but aims to be “a pleasant companion at spare moments.” This frank admission shapes every aspect of the collection: entries are short, often no more than a few lines, and drawn from a deliberately wide range of sources—play and poem, essay and novel, maxim and epigram, memoir and diary. The result is a miscellany that prizes surprise over system, where a La Rochefoucauld maxim may sit beside a parody from The Shotover Papers, and a Byron couplet jostles a George Eliot dialect speech.

Brevity as a Design Principle

The preface insists on two criteria for selection: “brevity and variety.” Nearly every entry can be read “almost at a glance,” and the editor has favored punchy forms—epigrams, puns, single-stanza poems, and short anecdotes. A typical page might offer a four-line Byron quatrain (“Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, / Sermons and soda-water the day after”) followed by a prose anecdote about Dr. Busby being threatened with flogging aboard a ship. The effect is kaleidoscopic: the reader never settles into a single tone or period. Adams explicitly discourages consecutive reading, framing the book as something to “dip into” rather than study. This is a deliberate authorial choice that privileges immediate impact over sustained argument.

Voices from the Margins: Dialect and Character Speech

Several entries preserve non-standard or dialect speech, giving the anthology a texture of oral immediacy. Mrs. Poyser from George Eliot’s Adam Bede appears with a complaint about a man who “couldna be hatched o’er again, an’ hatched different.” Bartle Massey, from the same novel, compares Scottish tunes to “a scolding, nagging woman” that “never come to a reasonable end.” These excerpts are not merely quoted; they are placed without explanatory framing, trusting the reader to catch the character’s voice and implied judgment. The inclusion of such dialect passages alongside polished epigrams from Sydney Smith or Lord Byron creates a deliberate contrast in register, suggesting that wit is not the property of any single class or style.

Puns, Parodies, and the Play of Form

Adams has a clear fondness for verbal play. The anthology includes puns (the Hon. Hugh Rowley’s Puniana is listed among related volumes), parodies, and light verse that twists familiar forms. A poem by Andrew Lang, “Ballades in Blue China,” celebrates the “glaze and the mark / Of china that’s ancient and blue” in a mock-heroic tone. C. S. Calverley contributes a couplet that puns on “Allsopp” (a brand of ale) and “native pewter.” The editor’s own title—Quips and Quiddities—announces this linguistic self-consciousness, and the epigraph from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (“How now, how now, mad wag? what, in thy Quips and thy Quiddities?”) frames the whole project as a kind of licensed foolery.

The Anthology as Social Record

Beyond mere amusement, the selections offer a window into late-Victorian taste. The book belongs to Chatto & Windus’s “Mayfair Library,” a series that included works on gastronomy, clerical anecdotes, and “The Agony Column of The Times.” The excerpts frequently target social pretension, marital discord, and literary vanity. A line from Lord Beaconsfield’s Lothair has a character remark that “nothing in the newspapers is ever true” and that they are popular because “the taste of the age” favors fiction. Another entry, from J. C. Young’s Diary, dryly notes that a man “cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon his lordship” because “his wife is dead.” These are not timeless aphorisms but period-specific jabs, and Adams’s decision to preserve them gives the anthology a documentary quality.

Because the excerpts are so brief and varied, the reader’s experience depends heavily on the order in which they are encountered. The book rewards random opening and browsing more than linear progress. Pay attention to the juxtapositions: a solemn maxim followed by a silly pun, a dialect complaint next to a polished couplet. These collisions are the real substance of the collection, revealing the editor’s sense of humor and his era’s appetite for wit that is at once learned and irreverent.