John Jerome; A Book Without Beginning

   Scythrop Glowry on Apr 27 09:32:47

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John Jerome His Thoughts and Ways a Book Without Beginning (1886) by Jean Inglow is very funny. "The book is not to be a mere novel, anyone can write such a thing as that." So Katharina said, but to my delight, I find that Jean Inglow has written novels herself! I must read them someday.

This is the first thing I have read of hers, probably the first time I've heard of her.

It's rather like a Victorian update of Tristram Shandy.

Quote from the book:

"It is to go on," she continued, " just as you do when you talk."

"About virtue and probity," I suggested.

" I dare say ! " was her reply. " No, you are to write of the odd things you think, and the odd things you do."

What am I doing now ? Nothing, I am sure, but what is most natural, most commonplace, and most laudable.

I am in lodgings in the royal borough of Windsor. I frequent these every year for about a month in order to hunt for, and, I am proud to say, occasionally to find, the larvæ of an extremely rare (and ravenous) lepidopterous insect, which the Queen preserves for me with unconscious benignity in a swamp in Windsor Great Park.