Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers

by F. Anstey

Set in Victorian times, the novel concerns business man Paul Bultitude and his son Dick. Dick is about to leave home for a boarding school which is ruled by the cane wielding headmaster Dr. Grimstone. Bultitude, seeing his son's fear of going to the school, foolishly says that schooldays are the best years of a boy's life, and how he wished that he was the one so doing.

At this point, thanks to a handy magic stone brought by an uncle from India which grants the possessor one wish, they are now on even terms. Dick, now holding the stone, is ordered by his father to turn him back into his own body, but Dick refuses, and decides instead to become his father, and so the fun begins. Mr. Bultitude has to begin the new academic term at his son's boarding school, while Dick gets a chance to run his father's business in the City. In the end, they are both restored to their own bodies, with a better understanding of each other.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Classics, Humor, School Stories, Victorian, Comedy

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1882

About the author

Thomas Anstey Guthrie 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. He published in 1883 a serious novel, The Giant's Robe; but, in spite of its excellence, 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.

Guthrie became an important member of the staff of Punch magazine, in which his voces populi and his humorous parodies of a reciter's stock-piece (Burglar Bill, &c.) represent his best work. In 1901, his successful farce The Man from Blankleys, based on a story that originally appeared in Punch, was first produced at the Prince of Wales Theatre, in London. He wrote Only Toys (1903) and Salted Almonds (1906).

Many of Anstey's stories have been adapted into theatrical productions and motion pictures. The Tinted Venus was adapted by S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash, and Kurt Weill into One Touch of Venus in 1943. Vice Versa has been filmed many times, usually transposed in setting and without any credit to the original book. Another of his novels, The Brass Bottle, has also been filmed more than once, including The Brass Bottle (1964).

Reviews

[Marilynn A Grieser]

This is an old book published in 1882. I read it as it was mentioned in Surprised by Joy (CSLewis), so, of course, I was curious! It's a book of fantasy in which a son and his father, through the magic of a Garuda Stone, exchange bodies. Following this event, the father (Paul Bultitude) finds himself immediately sent off to his son's harsh boarding school in his son's body, while leaving the boy to run the household with access to his father's money yet still possessing the mentality and desires of boyhood. The majority of the book is narrated through the father's perspective while trying to survive the dreadful life of an early English boarding school. Bodies are restored and lessons learned with mutual understanding and family life greatly changed and forever improved. Ah, yes, they lived happily ever after! Ha!

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Jeff Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book written in 1882 is the first take on the Father/Son switch of bodies plot which was later taken up in the movies Vice Versa and Big.

The plot follows along the father as he is forced to attend the school is son had been previously begging for him not to send him to. So there are many of the common elements of the English schoolboy genre, though the headmaster is not quite the Dicken's villain. Nicely written and pretty funny as this respectable businessman is forced to endure the intrigues of the school where he seems to have totally forgotten what being a child was like. So many comedic errors in trying to maintain his idea of himself as a gentleman when coming up against both his sons friends and enemies. Quite enjoyable and available on Project Gutenberg.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such a fantastic plot that it has fathered many versions of itself - all interesting in their own right. Who hasn't wondered what it would be like to be someone else? Who wouldn't like to try out someone else's life for a bit?

It has it's laughs - and like all really great humor, it has a serious core. Love the idea of learning to consider another person's perspective, learning to listen to them and not to one's own preconceived notions of them.

And it killed Trollope, which deserves it's own book!

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of C.S.Lewis's favorite books. He is quoted to have said that this book gave the truest and realest representation of life in an English private school for boys.
The book is very well written. While it starts from an (unbelievable) instance of magic, and there is another at the end so that things can get back to normal, everything happening in the middle is strictly realistic.
A good fantasy book.

[Matthew Gatheringwater]

Is this the novel that killed Trollope?

[Penn Hackney · Rating 4 out of 5]

1882. F. Anstey is Sir Thomas Anstey Guthrie (8 August 1856 – 10 March 1934).

Bought for free on 1/12/25 because Mr. Bultitude is a comic and death-dealing hero of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945). Charles Franklyn Beach will be talking about this book that CSL loved; and why it mattered to him at the NYCSL Society on June 13, 2025:
https://www.nycslsociety.com/meetings-1

I would have thought that CSL might have written such a mock, but I suppose he felt himself too proper or academically involved to have experimented with such a form.

Mock:
Mr. Bultitude’s appearance
Contemporary novels and their tropes
Melodrama
Boarding school
Headmaster and assistant
School sports and games
School meals
cruelty and corporal punishment

DICK:
collects sweets
Makes love to Dulcie Grimstone
Blacks Coggs’s eye and “settled” Tipping
Was friends with Tom Grimstone
Played football well loc. 1678
“Pluck, and manners too” loc. 3322

Three mysteries:
Will they switch back, and if so, how?
What will be the result of the switch - the first, and the second?
Will Paul ever get his swishing (caning)?

"Mr. Bultitude, however, as has been explained, did not appreciate children—being a family man himself." Narrator! loc. 988

"Yes," said Mr. Blinkhorn. "You see I knew the Dick Bultitude that was, so well; he was frolicksome, impulsive, mischievous even, but under it all there lay a nature of sterling worth." "Sterling worth!" cried Paul. "A scoundrel, I tell you, a heartless, selfish young scoundrel.” loc. 1496

“Mums said your governor seemed to leave you here just like they leave umbrellas at picture galleries, and she believed he had a large-sized money-bag inside him instead of a heart." Tom Grimstone, loc. 1647

EVIDENCE OF TRUE CHANGE:
"Paul was resolved to have one desperate throw for liberty and home. He was more excited than anxious as he thought of it," loc. 1674 the beginning of change ?
"For the first time he repented his paternal harshness." loc. 1768
This was an unpalatable way of putting things, but Paul could not help seeing that there was some truth in it. Jolland had been kind to him, too, …. Ch. 12 loc. 2498.
"Never, never again would he joke, as he had been wont to do with Dick in lighter moods, on the subject of corporal punishment." Ch. 13 loc. 2689
"in spite of his indignation, the broken-down look of the boy, and the memory of his own sensations when waiting to be caned that morning, moved him to pity." loc. 3912
"Mr. Bultitude would never after this consider his family as a set of troublesome and thankless incumbrances; …. in so doing, open his eyes to qualities of which he had hitherto been in contented ignorance." loc. 3948

"he had the upper hand once more, and yet, somehow, he did not feel as much righteous wrath and desire for revenge as he expected to do." loc. 3806

Note Bultitude’s unquenchable, if delusional, belief that he can fix things.

The school, overall: “to an ordinary boy the life there would not have had any intolerable hardships, if it held out no exceptional attractions.” Narrator! Ch. 9 loc. 1863.

“It is astonishing how unfeeling even ordinary good-natured boys can be at times.” Narrator! loc. 2698

Other (reputedly) comic novels worth reading: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954), and Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed (1966)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/bo...

[Mike]

I've enjoyed other books by Anstey in which some supernatural happening leads to comedic vicissitudes for hapless members of the middle class, but up until now I've avoided this, his best-known one. Something about the premise and the description made me think I wouldn't enjoy it.

My instincts were sound. The book (as far as I read) largely follows Mr Bultitude, probable inspiration for the name of the bear in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength , a colonial products merchant who has sent his son, at much-resented expense, to be educated at a boarding school. It isn't one of the major, or even minor, public schools, but one of those institutions owned by the headmaster, a man given to dispensing punishment more based on his own emotions at the time than on the merits of the case.

The supernatural bit is that Mr Bultitude unwisely wishes he could change places with his son, who is reluctant to go back to school, while holding a magic stone that grants the wish. His own commercial education didn't prepare him to cope with Latin, Greek, German and pure mathematics, and his tendency to stand on his dignity and insist on things being done properly makes him thoroughly unpopular with his son's schoolfellows, who bully him considerably, while the headmaster impatiently dismisses Bultitude's ineffectual attempts to explain his unlikely situation. Meanwhile, the son, Dick, is neglecting his father's business and has given houseroom to his uncle, Bultitude's brother-in-law, who's the kind of person who sells his acquaintances worthless stock in non-existent companies.

The part I didn't like, and the reason I stopped reading, was that there was so much bullying, along with references to animal cruelty. I'm sure there's good stuff in the part I didn't read (roughly the second half of the book), but I wasn't enjoying it and didn't want to slog through it.

[Muaz Jalil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by Thomas Anstey Guthrie in 1882. The book was the inspiration for Freaky Friday. Fun to read, deals with father taking the role of son and ending up in English boarding school.

[Miranda · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Yes, this was no dream of distempered digestion, but sober reality. . . .And now he, Paul Bultitude, the widely-respected merchant of Mincing Lane, a man of means and position, was being ignominiously packed off to school as if he were actually the schoolboy some hideous juggle had made him appear!"

One of the first stories revolving around a magical body-swap between parent and child, "Vice Versa" might be called the original "Freaky Friday." The short novel was massively popular in its time and now largely forgotten, with good reason. The story, while fantastic in its premise, is repetitive, primarily dwelling on Paul's trials and sufferings at school, and we get to see so little of the boisterous hijinks that his son Dick gets up to on Mincing Lane; although some scenes are delightfully absurd, the overall style emphasizes the didactic.

I did find its unexpectedly sustained explorations of the interrelations between embodiment, power, and silence/voice fascinating. There's a lot of interesting, and likely underexplored, material for those studying Victorian father/son relationships, school novels, and magical stones of ambiguously "exotic" origins as well, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for a pleasure read.

[Wanda]

8 JAN 2015 - recommended by Bettie, here is the original "Freaky Friday." What fun.

Enjoy a free Project Gutenberg download here - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26853

[Uri Cohen]

In this mildly amusing novel, a father and son swap bodies. It sounds suspiciously like Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers (or rather her sequel Summer Switch, which involves a father and son instead of a mother and daughter), but Vice Versa was published about a century earlier, in 1882. It seems to be the first known example of a fictional bodyswap, which has since been done many times.

Vice Versa is told from the perspective of Mr. Paul Bultitude, a complacent businessman who doesn't like children, including his own. Trying to convince his son Dick to go back to boarding school, Paul pompously proclaims that he wishes he could be a schoolboy like him. Too bad he's holding a magical artifact which grants the wish! (By the way, the author also wrote a book, The Brass Bottle, that inspired the TV series I Dream of Jeannie.)

Father and son are body-swapped and Paul is forced to go to school in his son's identity. He is miserable there, especially as he refuses to accept the situation and act like the other boys (so they view him as a tattletale and gang up on him). Yes, eventually the swap is reversed, and the father learns some important lessons. (Not so much the son, but in any case he's peripheral to the plot.)

Unfortunately, the book is way too long, with the school part dragging on for twelve repetitive chapters. And Mr. Bultitude is too much of a jerk to get much sympathy from readers, or at least from me.

Vice Versa was recommended by George Orwell, who mentions it in his 1945 essay "Good Bad Books" as an example of "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." I'm not sure that the book has lasted the test of time, but I don't regret reading it. Thanks, George!

[Tom Britz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of this book or the author before, until I came across an interesting tidbit in a biography of Anthony Trollope. Anthony, who has himself rapidly advanced into the top echelon of my favorite authors, supposedly was at a friends house at a public reading of Vice Versa and was laughing so hard that he gave himself a stroke, which eventually proved fatal. I had to read this as soon as I heard that. I love a good laugh and if Trollope found it that funny, I had to read it. I found it to be an amusing tale, but certainly nothing to die for.
At the time of it's publication in 1882 this may have been one of the first stories of body transfers, when the father makes an unthinking wish that he was the one going back to school instead of his reluctant son while holding onto what he thought was a fake talisman. When he's suddenly transferred into the spitting image of his son, he belatedly is aware that the talisman is in fact real. However it only grants one wish. Without thinking he hands the stone to his son and orders him to wish his father back. However the boy instead wishes himself into his father's image.
From this beginning the tale takes us to the stuffy and too correct parent's attempt to survive a private school. He finds it a bit more than he reckoned for.
I may give this a 4.5 as some of the scenes were indeed funny, but the timing of my reading was against this being as quick a read as it should have been. Too many distractions. After finishing it, I find that I am looking back on it with some fondness. It really is a classic of its type.

[Paul Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this was an entertaining enough book, with a fine sense of humor, I think it could have done better with the plot. I don't think I am giving much away to say that in the end, the father and son reconcile, but because there is so little contact between the father and son throughout the book, and because the father never ceases casting the son as his villain, the end doesn't really ring true.

Certain recent movies have treated this subject better, but what is valuable, is the detailed view of school life at the time at more modest school than the one in kipling's Stalky and Co. I also like the charactature of the German professor, especially to compare it to the German charactatures of today.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Published in 1882, this novel is a precursor to the modern day "Freaky Friday". Father and son, Paul and David, via a wish on a magical stone accidentally switch places and Father is off to boarding school while son runs things at home. The story mostly centers at the school. The whole Victorian vibe is so different from the modern day comedy at times more melodramatic than funny. Incidentally, rumor has it that the author Trollope laughed so hard at this comical novel that it brought on his demise from a heart ailment a short time after reading it. That is the story that bought me to read this novel. It wasn't quite that funny!

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two things you may not know, but you really should.

1. This little book was written in 1882 and is the book that inspired Disney’s Freaky Friday.

2. This little book is what killed Anthony Trollope. Quite literally—his niece Edith was reading it to him, and he suffered a stroke as a result of laughing so hard over it.

Granted I didn’t find it quite as hilarious as Trollope did (his own books are much funnier!), I still enjoyed it, and loved reading something a favorite author enjoyed so much.

[Emesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an interesting book, with an interesting plot, very humorous and sweet. But I would've preferred if it was either shorter or if the son's narrative was employed as much as the father's was in the switch, it would've offered an interesting alternation in perspective, instead of a completely alien, and sometimes melancholic fatherly narrative of boyhood, but oh well, Anstey's long been dead.

[Lauryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not funny, mostly just an entire novel of a man complaining about how no one respects him because he's in the body of his teen son. With a whiny and entitled narrator I'd rather watch the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis Freaky Friday movie.

[Tricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

One cannot help but dislike Mr. Bultitude in the first couple chapters, but eventually sympathizes with him in his school trials and attempts to escape his situation. A wonderful story!

[Jonathan Bracker]

I have read that Anthony Trollope laughed out loud when he read this book, and as a result had an apoleptic [sp?] stroke, from which he died.

[M Ilham · Rating 5 out of 5]

buku yang kubaca yaitu vice versa: sebuah catatan seorang pembaca sastra karya dwi cipta. Bukunya bagus dan kujadikan rujukan untuk mengulas buku.

[Scott Delgado · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a little stuffy at first, but it got rather good. It was interesting to read about the subject matter of body-swapping in the 1880's.

[Catie]

#trolloping group read on IG - May 2024

[Zoka · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5⭐️

[Lin Bo · Rating 4 out of 5]

fun Victorian throwback

[Lulu]

1882- first body swap

[Matthew Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

overall the book was interesting as an 1800s beginning to the Freaky Friday trope.

[Cool Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very interesting. It is inspiring, because fantasy books were viewed in a negative way in that day and age. They were seen as a waste of time, and frivolous. But, the author of this book, preserved, and wrote it. He made a lasting impact on our pop culture.
Which is remembered over 100 years later.

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 4 out of 5]

The inspiration for Freaky Friday, this book is about a Victorian man, Mr. Bultitude, and his son who accidentally change places. True to its subtitle "A Lesson to Fathers," the book is mostly concerned with how the father, having to cope with his son's life, grows and changes. One day, at the end of a term break, faced with his son not wanting to go back to the school, he rashly proclaims, "Perhaps you will believe me...when I tell you, old as I am and much as you envy me, I only wish, at this very moment, I could be a boy again, like you. Going back to school wouldn't make me unhappy, I can tell you." Ah, hubris. He just happens to be holding a stone from India, not knowing it's a wishing stone, and quick as you can say "I didn't mean it!" he's a boy on his way to boarding school. The boarding school is unpleasant (the food! Oh the horror of the food.), but what makes it truly terrible for Mr. Bultitude is the fact that while he looks like his son, he acts like his own pompous, grown-up, rigid, tattle-tale self, which doesn't endear him to anyone. He begins to make enemies the moment he gets on the train with the other kids on the way to the school. By the time he gets there, the tone is set. The book starts out as a light comedy, but becomes more serious and interesting as it goes. Mr. Bultitude makes absolutely no effort to fit in or make his own life easier:

"If it were not that it was so absolutely essential to the interest of this story, I think I should almost prefer to draw a veil over the sufferings of Mr. Bultitude during the rest of that unhappy week at Crichton House; but it would only be a false delicacy to do so.
Things went worse and worse with him. The real Dick in his most objectionable moods could never have contrived to render himself one quarter so disliked and suspected as his substitute was by the whole school--masters and boys.
It was in great measure his own fault too; for to an ordinary boy the life there would not have ahd any intolerable hardships, if it helf out no exceptional attractions. But he would not accommodate himself to circumstances..."

Instead, he tries to find opportunities to explain his situation, as though anyone would believe his story. Eventually, finding the situation more and more intolerable, he is left no option but to try to escape. When he finally manages to make it home to his family, he is a reformed man, one who can finally able to show love and kindness to his children.

C. S. Lewis had this to say about the book: "I spoke just now of Vice Versa. Its popularity was surely due to something more than farce. It is the only truthful school story in existence. The machinery of the [wishing stone] really serves to bring out in their true colours (which would otherwise seem exaggerated) the sensations which every boy had on passing from the warmth and softness and dignity of his home life to the privations, the raw and sordid ugliness, of school." -- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Ch 2.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as part of the F. Anstey anthology "Humour and Fantasy" and yes it is the book that allegedly killed Anthony Trollope: according to the Trollope society website "In September he left Harting and took quarters at Garland's Hotel, Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, London. Here, on November 3, while laughing at a family reading of F. Anstey's Vice Versa, he was struck down by a paralytic stroke; and on December 6, at a house in Welbeck Street, he died."
The story is probably the first "Body swap" comedy and as such is the direct or indirect inspiration for everything from such novels as Thorne Smith's "Turnabout" and P. G. Wodehouse's "Laughing Gas" to such movies as "Freaky Friday." The book it's self has been directly filmed at least three times.
The story concerns a farther and son who with the help of a magic stone swap place, the father into the sons body and well... vice versa. The story follows the father (now in the sons body) to boarding school and tells of his misadventures there. The son (in the fathers body's) misadventures happen off-stage. The book was first published in 1882 and I thoroughly enjoyed it, although not perhaps killingly funny I regularly laughed-out-loud and I look forward to reading more from F. Anstey.