F. Anstey
F. Anstey, the pen name of Thomas Anstey Guthrie, was a notable British author celebrated for his humorous fantasy works during the Victorian era. Born on August 8, 1856, in London, he was raised in a supportive environment that fostered his love for reading. Anstey’s education included time at Surbiton boarding school, where his experiences provided fodder for his later satirical writing, as well as studies at King's College School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He began his literary career contributing to student journals and quickly found success with his first major work, "Vice Versa," which explores a humorous body-switching narrative between a father and son. While Anstey attempted to create serious fiction, it often fell short compared to his lighter works, reflecting the cultural divide between serious literature and popular entertainment of his time. His storytelling also extended to children’s literature, characterized by the moral lessons typical of the Victorian period. As tastes evolved into the Edwardian era, Anstey's style—once beloved—gradually fell out of favor, culminating in a decline in his popularity. He passed away on March 10, 1934, leaving behind a legacy marked by wit and humor, albeit overshadowed by changing literary preferences.
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F. Anstey
Writer
- Born: August 8, 1856
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: March 10, 1934
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
F. Anstey was the pseudonym used by Thomas Anstey Guthrie to become one of the most popular writers of humorous fantasy in Victorian England. He was born on August 8, 1856, in London, England, and named for his father, a military tailor. His mother, Agusta Amherst Austen Guthrie, was a woman of gentle birth and made a home the son would later recall as having been happy. Both his parents were people of good humor, and encouraged him to read widely among the popular materials of the day.
Anstey’s experience at an English boarding school, Surbiton, gave him plenty of material for his satirical writings. Although his experiences there were not always pleasant, his fundamentally sunny disposition refused to allow him to dwell upon it or become bitter about it. From there, he continued on an educational path typical of a young man of the British upper classes of that period, studying at King’s College School in London and then at Trinity Hall of Cambridge University. It was while he was at Cambridge that he began writing seriously and contributing to various student journals. He attempted to start a journal of his own, and made a stab at a novel.
Although Anstey was trained for a career in law, he was never to actually practice for any extended time, due to his early success in writing. During this time, he settled on the pseudonym F. Anstey, at least partly because it was not considered appropriate at that time for a gentleman of means to write light humorous fantasy or satire under his own name. His first success was Vice Versa, the story of a father and son who mysteriously switch bodies and through humorous misadventures learn what the world is like for the other. It would become the model of many humorous body-switch stories.
Anstey made a few attempts to write serious fiction, but they proved stiff, awkward, and altogether inferior to his humorous fantasies, which were generally supple and delightful. However, his determination to write serious fiction reflects the growing divide at that point in time between “serious” and “popular” fiction, meaning that what was written for the entertainment of the masses grew increasingly suspect in the halls of literature. He also wrote some children’s fiction, although it tended to have the strong didactic bias found throughout Victorian children’s literature, which regarded no story complete unless it taught some useful lesson to its young readers.
As the Victorian era gave way to the Edwardian, Anstey’s didactic bent, which showed up even in his adult works, was beginning to cost him popularity with a new generation that did not want everything to serve some useful purpose. He wrote his last novel, In Brief Authority, in 1915, and subsequently wrote primarily short fiction. He died of pneumonia on March 10, 1934, in London, his reputation almost entirely in eclipse as a result of changing tastes.