Lord Emsworth's Annotated Whiffle: The Care of the Pig

by James Hogg

Lord Emsworth's "bible on the pig", a book he and his pigman studied assidiously, was a massive work by Augustus Whiffle which explained in great detail the care and management of the pig. James Hogg has discovered Emsworth's personal copy of the book and edited it to a more manageable length.

Genres: Humor

128 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 1991

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

James^^Hogg

Reviews

[Dan Schwent · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whiffle: The Care of the Pig is a prop in several of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle books so naturally I snatched it up. Instead of the 700+ page tome of legend, this one is a mere 128 pages. It's a mildly amusing book about pigs, pigkeeping, raising pigs, and other porcine pursuits. The main attraction are the handwritten notes in the margins of many of he pages, purported to be those of Lord Emsworth. Seeing as how the Earl was rather dotty, many of the footnotes are worth a chuckle.

I'd recommend this to Wodehouse and pig enthusiasts. It's not hilarious but is worth a gander in your spare time.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting parody of a late Victorian/Edwardian naturalist's guide, inspired by Lord Emsworth's favorite book in PG Wodehouse's Blandings novels and stories. It's a reasonably enjoyable book providing some info on pigs, with a lot of the kind of personal anecdotes that one expects from these type of upper class authors who were experts in esoteric subjects without really being great authors as such. It's a fun read if you're at least a bit interested in pigs, or in the eccentricities of late Victorian/Edwardian aristocrats.

What's rather disappointing here is the annotations. This book is titled and sold as Lord Emsworth's Annotated Whiffle, but for the most part it's just a short (128 page, as opposed to the 700+ described in Wodehouse) version of Augustus Whiffle's The Care of the Pig. There are some annotations, but they're usually quite brief and uninteresting, mostly thinks like "Ask Wellbeloved about this," "Galahad knew someone who was there," or "Thankfully the Empress is agreeable." The annotations aren't particularly important or insightful, and there are often several pages at a stretch with no annotations at all. I like the idea of an annotated Whiffle, but I feel that if the book is going to be titled Lord Emsworth's Annotated Whiffle--with the primacy given to the annotations--then there should be both a greater quantity of and more interesting material in the annotations.