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Cover image for the Paperback format of The Swan Song of A.J. Wentworth

The Swan Song of A.J. Wentworth

Part of the series: The Wentworth Papers
ISBN 9781788421850 Published 14 November 2019
£8.99

The last of the humorous fictional memoirs of a hapless assistant schoolmaster.

It is to be A.J. Wentworth’s final appearance on the scholastic scene. Once more he dons his cap and gown – or, to be more precise, Rawlinson’s cap and gown – and returns to Burgrove for just one more time.

His final term includes a brief but broadening visit to the United States, in addition to the usual intellectual cut and thrust of the classroom. Whether he’s causing a stir on Fifth Avenue, or merely ‘trying to knock a bit of sense into a bunch of thick-headed boys,’ A.J. Wentworth fumbles, blusters and generally carries on.

A comic study in blinkered English manners, the Wentworth Papers will delight fans of P.G. Wodehouse or Grossmiths' Mr Pooter. First introduced to readers in the pages of Punch magazine, it was later dramatized for both BBC Radio and ITV drama.

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Pre-order: charged now, published 14 November 2019. Print is despatched on publication; ebooks are ready to download that morning.

Pre-order: charged now, published 14 November 2019. Print is despatched on publication; ebooks are ready to download that morning.

Book details
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9781788421850
Published
14 November 2019
Dimensions
129 x 198 mm
Genre
Satire
Imprint
Farrago

Reviews

Praise for the Wentworth Papers:

‘A splendid comic hero … cannot fail to engage the sympathy of everyone who has ever sat in a classroom either as master or pupil … Few books have made me laugh out loud quite so often’ 

Evening Standard

‘I was often helpless with laughter. Not a book to be read in public’ 

The Oldie

‘A truly comic invention’ 

The Guardian

‘Masterly caricature’ 

Times Literary Supplement

‘Wentworth turns out to be the hero of a work certain to be pigeon-holed as a minor classic by which people usually mean a classic more readable than the major kind … a man Mr Pooter would regard with awe but nevertheless recognise as a brother’ 

Spectator

‘A book of such hilarious nature that I had to give up reading it in public’ 

New Statesman


‘One of the funniest books ever’ 

Sunday Express

About the author

H.F. Ellis

Humphry Francis Ellis was born in 1907 in Lincolnshire, and educated at Tonbridge and Magdalen College, Oxford. Following a year as assistant master at Marlborough school he began to write for Punch magazine. In 1949 Ellis became Punch’s Literary and Deputy Editor, a post which he held until 1953. It was during this period that he developed the character of A. J. Wentworth, inspired by his experience as a schoolmaster. Punch continued to publish Ellis's work, though from 1954 he found a more lucrative market in The New Yorker, where the Wentworth stories proved very popular.

Everything by H.F. Ellis