Back to the Classics 2021 #16

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Children's Classic:  I read this forgotten classic because it was alluded to in E. Nesbit’s The Five Children and It. I found it pretty funny overall but be warned: the casual color prejudice of 1900 makes us wince and cringe nowadays.

The Brass Bottle - J. Anstey

A struggling London architect is sent on a mission by his prospective father-in-law, a professor of classics. He is to attend an auction of antiquities and bid on certain items, observing strict limits on expense. All the items on the wish list are bid out of range, but on his own shilling he purchases a brass bottle. Once home, through a series of mishaps that could happen to anybody, he frees a genie who has been imprisoned inside the brass bottle.

Though since childhood I have usually recognized a false image concocted by the West and inflicted on the East when I see one, I am still a card-carrying member of the last generation that can tolerate Charlie Chan. So, sadly unreconstructed, I found the spoof of “Oriental politeness” hilarious.

"I had a kinswoman, Bedeea-el-Jemal, who possessed incomparable beauty and manifold accomplishments. And seeing that, though a Jinneeyeh, she was of the believing Jinn, I despatched messengers to Suleyman the Great, the son of Daood, offering him her hand in marriage. But a certain Jarjarees, the son of Rejmoos, the son of Iblees—may he be for ever accursed!—looked with favour upon the maiden, and, going secretly unto Suleyman, persuaded him that I was preparing a crafty snare for the King's undoing."

"And, of course, you never thought of such a thing?" said Ventimore.

"By a venomous tongue the fairest motives may be rendered foul," was the somewhat evasive reply. "Thus it came to pass that Suleyman—on whom be peace!—listened unto the voice of Jarjarees and refused to receive the maiden. Moreover, he commanded that I should be seized and imprisoned in a bottle of brass and cast into the Sea of El-Karkar, there to abide the Day of Doom."

"Too bad—really too bad!" murmured Horace, in a tone that he could only hope was sufficiently sympathetic.

So the genie wants to express his gratitude for being freed. The problem is that the riches and opportunities he showers upon the poor architect lead to hilarious troubles, none of which I will spoil by relating them. For somebody like me who works at a university, however, richly satisfying is the situation in which an academic is transformed into a cranky quadruped.

Like many comic novels, it gets draggy near the end. But read it, making allowances for attitudes and assumptions that we reasonably deplore today.