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    The Little Nugget
    The Little Nugget
    The Little Nugget
    Ebook277 pages3 hours

    The Little Nugget

    By P. G. Wodehouse

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    When the 'Little Nugget', alias of thirteen-year-old Ogden Ford, bulgy, rude, chain-smoking son of an American millionaire, arrives at Sanstead House School, the fun has just begun. He is named ''the Little Nugget'' due to his immense ransom value, being a prime target for kidnappers. Mr. Peter Burns, a none-too-dedicated schoolmaster engaged by snobbish Mr. Abney to educate his handpicked pupils, soon finds himself and his enraptured class at the mercy of an American gunman--and at the beginning of a series of truly mind-boggling adventures--in a delicious Wodehouse tale of suspense, excitement, and romance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateNov 1, 2012
    ISBN9781625580832
    Author

    P. G. Wodehouse

    Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975) was an English author. Though he was named after his godfather, the author was not a fan of his name and more commonly went by P.G Wodehouse. Known for his comedic work, Wodehouse created reoccurring characters that became a beloved staple of his literature. Though most of his work was set in London, Wodehouse also spent a fair amount of time in the United States. Much of his work was converted into an “American” version, and he wrote a series of Broadway musicals that helped lead to the development of the American musical. P.G Wodehouse’s eclectic and prolific canon of work both in Europe and America developed him to be one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century.

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    Reviews for The Little Nugget

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      Not quite a typical Wodehouse: there are professional criminals, a gun fight in which our hero is wounded, hints of an abusive relationship, and the main character actually matures and becomes a kinder person after the love of his life abruptly leaves him. This change happens before the story starts, but still---most Wodehouse characters don't evolve. Too much has happened in the world since the book was written to make kidnapping seem cute. Perhaps it's worth noting, then, that Wodehouse and Bolton accidentally abducted a child from a London train station when they thought they were supposed to pick up a young relative of a friend there, (Bring on the Girls!, pp, 182-190.) SPOILER: The kidnapper sees his profession as a means of restoring family harmony by making parents appreciate their child and each other. He has decided to marry and go straight and convinces the Fords that as an expert in his field he is most suited to guard their child from other kidnappers. He doesn't pay for his crimes; he will get a salary because of them.
    • 4/5
      The little nugget is the fat, jaded Ford boy, the only child of his wealthy, divorced parents. The parents are constantly having people kidnap the boy from each other, so that he isn't bothered at all when a stranger scoops him up. Wealthy Peter Burns has recently become engaged to a girl in the mother's circle, and to prove his love to her he agrees to be the latest kidnapper. He gets a teaching position as the boy's school and waits for his chance, but finds that he isn't the only one. And worse, the girl who jilted him five years before makes a living by watching the boy.This is a very early Wodehouse, around 1913, I think. He isn't quite as funny as he would become later, but it's definitely Wodehouse. People "shimmer" out of rooms and there's a character named Glossop. I wouldn't recommend this one for someone wanting to try out Wodehouse, but it's not bad for his fans.
    • 3/5
      The little nugget is Oswald Ford, a child so rich that kidnappers consider him the ultimate prize. He also deserves a spot in Wodehouse's Rogue's Gallery of Repulsive small boys (an actual Wodehouse phrase from Thank you, Jeeves. This book is something of an anomaly in the Wodehouse canon in that the story is (a) not narrated by a nitwit or from a nitwit's perspective and that (b) it is not entirely played for laughs. (The actual kidnapping scene is somewhat tense.) There is, however, the usual mixed-up romance between the well-meaning, stalwart young man and the pretty resourceful young girl and the characters are pleasant. Half-hearted Wodehouse is better than none at all.
    • 4/5
      Although I didn’t find this to be one of P. G. Wodehouse’s funniest works, I feel it rates as one of his best for plotting skills. It reads like a light-hearted crime novel.I also found it interesting, having read all of this author’s early books that were set in private schools and told from the perspective of the boys, that here we have a novel predominantly set in such a school, only this time we see it from the masters’ angle.I like how Mr Wodehouse opens events by using a third-person narrative, followed by – a few pages later – switching to a first-person narrator in the form of Peter Burns. Peter’s not a larger than life-type of character, but he’s easy to like through his down-to-earth realism.The Little Nugget himself is a detestable character, which is the author’s intention, and although his scenes are limited, he serves as a central focus upon which much of the story revolves.
    • 3/5
      Thorold's review has said nearly all of what needs to be said about this early Wodehouse. The construction of the book is curious until you are aware of it's origins and I don't think much of Wodehouse as a writer of romantic fiction. For me, some of the most interesting bits were to do with pre-war - WW1, that is - social attitudes. Plum was familiar with the USA by the time he wrote this book but he goes along with the prevalent British concept that all Americans were either millionaires or gangsters. The hero's potential mother-in-law, a widow, is described as being "... connected with money on all sides, but could only obtain it in rare and minute quantities." Nonetheless, she lives between Sloane Square and South Kensington - not quite as fashionable then as now but still a reasonable address. She also has a butler, Parker. I suppose poverty has always been a relative term.I had a moment of bibliomancy with this book. Waking very early and unable to sleep, I made a cup of tea and opened The Little Nugget where I had left off the previous day. I read this: "I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing only to be looked at when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism." How true, but to give due credit to the author, even one of his lesser works distracted me wonderfully until dawn broke.
    • 2/5
      This book, although published in 1913/1914, after the early Psmith books and A Gentleman of leisure, doesn't read like mature Wodehouse, and is only really of interest to hardcore enthusiasts who want to know more about Wodehouse's early development as a writer.It is a strange mish-mash: it originally appeared as a sensational boys' adventure story, 'The eighteen carat kid', serialised in The Captain in 1913. Wodehouse then bolted on a love interest and tweaked the thing to read as an adult novel, but it doesn't really come off. Ogden Ford is an unpleasant, spoilt teenager whose father's wealth has made him a popular target for kidnappers (we later meet him again in Piccadilly Jim); his mother has lost him in a custody battle and is also trying to get him back by force. The only real comic elements in the book come from Wodehouse's rather cruel depiction of the mother-son relationship. Mrs Ford has a cynical, money-grubbing hanger-on, Cynthia Drassilis (one of the very rare examples in Wodehouse of a bad, or at least amoral young woman), who gets her fiancé, Peter Burns, to sign up as a schoolmaster with the intention of lifting Ogden from his prep school, Sanstead House in Hampshire. The school is obviously based on Emsworth House, where Wodehouse's friend and sometime collaborator Herbert Westbrook taught. Wodehouse lived in Emsworth village for some years and seems to have been involved in school activities.The main part of the story is told in the first person by Peter Burns, but for no apparent reason (apart from the author's convenience), the first thirty-five pages are in the third person, describing events Burns does not know about. This transition, together with the rather abrupt resolution of the love story in the last couple of pages, rather adds to the cobbled-together feel of the book as a whole. There are a few truly Wodehousean elements to treasure. There is a splendid butler (who is not, of course, all that he seems); Audrey Sheridan is a Wodehouse Girl in spe, although her late addition to the story means she doesn't get much to do. Burns is endearingly incompetent as an action hero (he empties his revolver at the villains, then discovers that he has omitted to bring any ammunition with him). Burns has a supremely competent valet, Smith, who doesn't actually have any lines in the story, but certainly foreshadows Jeeves. The headmaster, Mr Arnold Abney, is sent up mercilessly ("...headmasters of private schools are divided into two classes: the workers and the runners-up-to-London. Mr Abney belonged to the latter class. Indeed, I doubt if a finer representative of the class could have been found..."). Evelyn Waugh's Dr Fagan obviously owes something to him, as does Bertie Wooster's nemesis, the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn.Ultimately, however, Burns isn't really interesting enough as a personality or as a narrator to make us care very much whether he gets the correct girl in the end. The kidnapping story could be more interesting, and Wodehouse treats it seriously as an adventure story, but the comic ending undermines this.

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    The Little Nugget - P. G. Wodehouse

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