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Blandings - the logo of www.blandings.org.uk, the Companion to the works of P G Wodehouse

The Little Nugget

A novel

Peter Burns becomes a schoolmaster in order to kidnap a most repulsive child (The Little Nugget) to please his fiancée. His task is made harder by the attentions of rival kidnappers Smooth Sam Fisher and Buck McGinnis but more pleasant by the arrival of an old flame. When the action hots up, Peter is not found wanting.

Publishing Information

UK:1913 Methuen
1959 Penguin
1972 Barrie & Jenkins (with new preface)
1978 Penguin (with new preface) - (used here)
US:1914 W. J. Watt & Co.

First published in the US, April to September 1913 in Munsey's Magazine.

Based on the serial The Eighteen Carat Kid, first published in January - March 1913 in The Captain.

Several sites, describing the book immediately after mentioning the 'Kid', say 'it would appear again, under the Little Nugget title, in the Philadelphia Record, in 1940' all using exactly those words, copying an unknown original. But does 'it' mean The Eighteen Carat Kid appearing under or as the book title or is 'it' The Little Nugget serialised under its own name? This illustrates the problems created by lazy site authors copying each other without checking.

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After a slow and confusing start, partly caused by the added preface told in the third person, the story settles down to a first person tale of lost love, American gangsters and a child sophisticated beyond his years. Compared to the earlier version (see above) the added love interest spoils what is otherwise a good adventure story. Here Peter Burns is quite a different character, not at all sympathetic, who thinks he has changed. By the end of the book we see he is the same self-indulgent fool he started. I almost found myself rooting for Smooth Sam Fisher.

Much of the action takes place at a private school showing the schoolmaster's side of Wodehouse's earlier school stories. During the 1900s, PG helped out with musical plays etc at Emsworth School, Emsworth, Hants, which was run by the King-Halls. According to McCrum in his biography, Baldwin King-Hall was the model for Arnold Abney, the headmaster in this story.

The episode in the stables owes much to The Luck Stone from a few years earlier, published under a pseudonym.