Release date is 2026-02-13

Al Haines

"Mop Fair" by Arthur M. Binstead is an epistolary novel of social satire written in the early 20th century. Told through the lively letters of Lady Viola Drumcree, a sharp-eyed “fatherless” debutante, it skewers Edwardian high society and the music-hall demimonde with brisk, comic bite. The cast centers on Viola, her calculating mother, the Countess of Chertsey (Féo), her slippery stockbroker stepfather Cecil Contango, and her fragile suitor Lord Evelyn Godolphin Mountprospect.

The opening of the book finds Viola turning nineteen, lamenting her unknown paternity, and narrating a farce at Charing Cross where Féo tries to catch Contango meeting a mistress; he wriggles free with a palmful of lamp-soot, a lavatory detour, and a postman’s ill-timed message. She next accepts a proposal atop a regimental coach at Ascot, then exposes Contango’s sham arrest at Victoria—engineered to squeeze cash from Féo—and slips incognito into music-hall nightlife, complete with a spoof “Sports” programme. From a yacht off Cowes she fires off more vignettes: a dress-suited roué who dumps a stack of paramours’ cards into a chapel box, and an earl who outfits a cloak model on credit and is hunted down by his wife. At Dinard she coolly reports her fiancé’s sudden death from tight-lacing, and closes with a comic mix-up over a coded rendezvous tagged “Fragile,” ending in a vanishing act and a joke about breakable glass. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Edinburgh: Sands & Co., 1905