The Colonel (play)

The story concerns the efforts of two aesthetic impostors to gain control of a family fortune by converting a man's wife and mother-in-law to follow aestheticism.

On 4 October 1881, The Colonel received a command performance before Queen Victoria (the first play to do so in twenty years (since the death of Prince Albert in 1861).

The old friend restores the husband's supremacy in his home by pointing out to the misguided wife the dangers inherent in suppressing innocent and fashionable pleasures in the name of an exaggerated devotion.

Squire Bancroft, manager of the Haymarket Theatre had asked Burnand to create a new version of Bayard's story.

Beginning in the late 1870s, George du Maurier had published a long series of cartoons in the magazine satirizing the aesthetes.

One of the Punch cartoons featuring the colonel
Theatrical poster from Punch shortly after the première of Patience and The Colonel .
Rowland Buckstone and Cissy Grahame reprising their roles in the 1887 revival
Another Punch cartoon