The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapters Twenty to Twenty-Four

In which a very delicate town is encountered, the Lion becomes a king through assassination, better use is made of the Winged Monkeys than last time, our heroes finally meet Glinda, and all is brought to a happy ending.



Once again, better late than never, eh? Eh? Eh. Sorry to keep you waiting, but here are the last set of illustrations for our story:

Okay, am I the only one bothered by the fact that the Cowardly Lion becomes King of the Beasts by stone-cold killing a creature in its sleep, on the say-so of complete strangers? I mean, sure, it was an ugly spider-creature of some kind — which, I note, is NOT illustrated — but how do we really know that what these animals said is true? Maybe they just didn't like him. And killing it in its sleep? I know, there's a fine line between cowardly and pragmatic, but geez.

Also, I gotta say, I'd forgotten just how much I'd have to end up using the "dismemberment" tag in this book.

This seems like an odd place for this specific illustration, doesn't it? I mean, the previous illustrations were clearly counting down Dorothy's uses of the Golden Cap, yet her third use of it was at the end of the previous chapter, not this one. This is where Glinda uses all three up at one go, which while I guess working for this specific illustration violates the pattern set up by the previous two. WHY DID NO ONE CONSULT ME ABOUT THIS.

So this clears up one of those plot holes the movie left by combining Glinda and the Witch of the North. Why didn't Glinda just tell Dorothy all the way back in Munchkinland that the Ruby Slippers could take her home? "You wouldn't have believed me!" Are you... TRY ME! Seriously, though, I think that means that movie Glinda just wanted to get the Wicked Witch of the West bumped off.

"Here ends the story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," which was written by L. Frank Baum
and illustrated by William Wallace Denslow. The engravings were made by the Illinois
Engraving Company, the paper was supplied by Dwight Brothers Paper Company, and Messrs.
A. P. Barnes & Company printed the book for the publishers, the George M. Hill Company,
completing it on the fifteenth day of May, in the year nineteen hundred."

And that wraps it up for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz! Thanks again for listening, and come back in the new year for a short story, followed by our next book. Happy holidays, everyone!



If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg here without pictures, or here with. Though the illustrated page is where I got our illustrations from, the layout is wonky and can be hard to read, so to see what the text looks like with the illustrations properly integrated, take a look at this facsimile of the original edition up at openlibrary.org. No reading ahead, though!