Up at the Athenaeum, one of the books I catalogued last Friday was Sir Frizzle Pumpkin, by James White.

Knowing nothing about the book, I simply assumed it was an early Victorian children’s story – a sort of Alice in Wonderland lite.

Well I was wrong, wrong as a doorknob.

James White was born in Scotland, but became an Anglican vicar in England. Inheriting money he retired to the Isle of Wight to become writer of stories and historical tragedies.

Many of his short stories were published in Blackwood’s Magazine, which was a major early Victorian publication – such was its standing that many would be authors – including Bramwell Bronte – tried to achieve some sort of reputation by being published by Blackwoods.

James White was friends with Dickens – for a time they were neighbours, but unlike Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and others of Dickens’ network of friends and fellow writers seems to have dropped out of the literary canon.

So, out of curiosity I went searching for an online copy of the book. It turns out that as well as the Internet archive there’s a version available on Google Books as part of the National Library of Scotland’s digitisation strategy, and it appeared to be the same edition as ‘our’ version.

I transferred it to the generic e-reader I bought a few weeks ago and began to read.

It’s not a children’s book at all. It’s satire, and a collection of the pieces that James White wrote for Blackwood’s.

The first story, about Sir Frizzle, reads like something out of Thackeray, about how a profoundly cowardly man, ends up, by a series of accidents – which are interpreted as acts of foolhardy bravery by onlookers – a senior commander in the British Army at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

It’s well written, it’s amusing, with none of the heavy handedness of some early Victorian humour.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve read the whole book. I haven’t. Yet.

But I am going to read the whole thing…