Augustus Carp, Esq.

[1] "Churchwarden, Sunday-school superintendent and President of the St Potamus Purity League, Augustus Carp Esquire is the unflinching opponent of Sin in all its manifestations.

Glorious in his mediocrity, assiduous in exposing the faults of everyone he meets, resolute in the pursuit of goodness and his own advancement, the dimensions of his piety are matched only by his girth.

In the same edition of that book, Frank Muir wrote:[3] One of those little masterpieces that seems to pop up from nowhere: a sovereign cure for morbid thoughts and lack of lustre.

In his preface to the 1987 Penguin edition Robert Robinson wrote:[2] "... the Carps are hugely unsympathetic, ... meanness and spite are elevated to operatic levels of booming humbug.

It is part of the creative mystery that such a scenario should break the narrow bounds of what might simply have been based on a rather snooty view of lower-middle-class bigotry, and become a much less easily defined thing - a sort of fairy-tale."