By Helen E. Hokinson and made famous by their periodic appearance on the covers of Manhattan’s sophisticated weekly, the dowager and her manservant have traveled the world, effectively satirized one phase of America’s hopeless servant problem.
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| CHRISTMAS COMES TO THE NEW YORKER'S FAT LADY AND HER BUTLER |
One of the 20th century's most influential cartoonists, Helen Hokinson (1893-1949) chronicled the social comings and goings of the middle-aged American matron in the pages of the New Yorker for nearly a quarter century. She traded her early aspirations to become either a painter or a fashion illustrator for life as a cartoonist after one of her early cartooning efforts was accepted for publication by the newly founded magazine in 1925. Hokinson's cartoons were peopled with what came to be known as "those Hokinson ladies." The ladies of Hokinson's cartoons, all of them "slightly overweight, behatted, and ranging in mental state from outright addled to merely puzzled, populated garden clubs, library societies, civic meetings, and luncheons, and they entertained numberless notions and aspirations that were at once ridiculous and engagingly innocent," according to a profile of Hokinson in Her Heritage: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Famous American Women.