Augustus Carp, Esq.: By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man - Softcover

Bashford, Henry Howarth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140098577 ISBN 13: 9780140098570

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1988

Synopsis

It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily reporting scenes of violence, divorce, and arson; when quite young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children, enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed -- then it is obviously a task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher example before the world. For some time -- I am now forty-seven -- I had been feeling this with increasing urgency. And when not only my wife and her four sisters, but the vicar of my parish, the Reverend Simeon Whey, approached me with the same suggestion, I felt that delay would amount to sin. That sin, by many persons, is now lightly regarded, I am, of course, only too well aware. That its very existence is denied by others is a fact equally familiar to me. But I am not one of them. On every ground I am an unflinching opponent of sin. I have continually rebuked it in others. I have strictly refrained from it in myself. And for that reason alone I have deemed it incumbent upon me to issue this volume.

About this title

From the Publisher

A Churchwarden, Sunday school superintendent, and President of the St Potamus Purity League, Augustus Carp is assiduous in exposing the sins and foibles of others while studiously ignoring his own. Although he campaigns against lechery, drinking, and smoking, he manages to indulge himself in plenty of other vices in the name of piety. The more seriously Carp takes himself, the more ridiculous he becomes. His frequent falls from dignity are uproarious: from his inability to climb off buses without falling over to his lifelong problems with flatulence. As a satire on hypocrisy, there is nothing quite like it in English prose. Henry Howarth Bashford was Hon. Physician to King George VI; "Augustus Carp Esq." is his sole comic masterpiece.

About the Author

Sir Henry H. Bashford (1880–1961) was Chief Medical Officer to the Post Office, Medical Adviser to the Treasury, and Honorary Physician to King George VI. In addition to medical articles for the Lancet, he wrote poetry and nonfiction. Augustus Carp is Bashford's only work of humor; he published it under a pseudonym and his identity as the author remained unknown until after his death.
"Robin," the book's illustrator, was Punch cartoonist Marjorie Blood. A year after illustrating the book, she joined Roehampton Convent, where generations of girls knew her as Mother Catherine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140098577
• ISBN 13: 9780140098570
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208