Thomas Anstey Guthrie

Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. (1897) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie

Thomas Anstey Guthrie (8 August 1856 - 10 March 1934) was an English novelist and journalist, who wrote his comic novels under the pseudonym F. Anstey. He was born in Kensington, London, to Augusta Amherst Austen, an organist and composer, and Thomas Anstey Guthrie. He was educated at King's College School and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1880. But the popular success of his story Vice Versa (1882) with its topsy turvy substitution of a father for his schoolboy son, at once made his reputation as a humorist of an original type. In 1883, he published a serious novel, The Giant's Robe; but he discovered (and again in 1889 with The Pariah) that it was not as a serious novelist but as a humorist that the public insisted on regarding him. As such, his reputation was further confirmed by The Black Poodle (1884), The Tinted Venus (1885), A Fallen Idol (1886), and other works. Baboo Jabberjee B. A. (1897), and A Bayard from Bengal (1902) are humorous yet truthful studies of the East Indian with a veneer of English civilization