Bashford, H(enry) H(owarth) 1880-1961

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BASHFORD, H(enry) H(owarth) 1880-1961

PERSONAL:

Born 1880; died 1961.

CAREER:

Writer and physician. Chief medical officer to the Post Office and Honorary Physician to King George VI.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Knighted, Order of the British Empire; Honorary Physician to King George VI.

WRITINGS:

Tommy Wideawake, John Lane (London, England), c. 1903.

The Manitoban: A Romance, J. Lane (London, England), 1904.

The Pilgrims' March, H. Holt and Company (New York, NY), 1909.

The Corner of Harley Street: Being Some Familiar Correspondence of Peter Harding, M. D., Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1911.

Pity the Poor Blind, Holt (New York, NY), 1913.

Vagabonds in Perigord, Constable (London, England), 1914.

Songs out of School, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1916.

A Plain Girl's Tale, W. Collins Sons (London, England), 1919.

(With Archibald Hurd) The Heroic Record of the British Navy; A Short History of the Naval War, 1914-1918, Doubleday, Page and Company (Garden City, NY), 1919.

Half-Past Bedtime, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1922.

The Happy Ghost, and Other Stories, Harper and Brothers (London, England), 1925.

Behind the Fog, a Tale of Adventure, W. Heinemann Ltd. (London, England), 1926; Harper and Brothers (New York, NY), 1927.

The Harley Street Calendar, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1929.

Lodgings for Twelve, Constable (London, England), 1935.

Doctors in Short Sleeves, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner (London, England), 1939.

Fisherman's Progress, Constable (London, England), 1946.

Wiltshire Harvest, Constable (London, England), 1953.

Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, Heinemann (London, England), 1924, reprinted, Prion (London, England), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

Born in 1880, H. H. Bashford spent his life as a doctor in England. He was named Chief Medical Officer to the Post Office and Honorary Physician to King George VI.

Though he wrote many books on varied topics throughout his lifetime he is best known as the author of Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man. In this mock autobiography and satire on hypocrisy, Bashford creates the amusingly ridiculous Carp, who spends more time worrying about the morality of others than noticing his own lack of piety. The book was originally published anonymously, and Bashford's identity as author was only discovered after his death in 1961. The work would probably not have received much notice if not for the promotion of it by writer Anthony Burgess who, as David Cohen quotes in his article for Nando Times, called it "one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century." A reviewer for the New Yorker enjoyed it as well, finding it "a sublime, ferocious farce." A contributor from Kirkus Review stated, "Bashford's genius transcends the obvious hypocrisies; his language and characters remind you of Pale Fire, or that other remarkable one-shot, A Confederacy of Dunces." A reviewer for Washington Post said of Carp, "He is in sum the ultimate parody of middle-class British gentility, and one could scarcely ask for parody more deftly or entertainingly done." Michael Rodgers of Library Journal found the book to be "great fun."