The Mortmere stories
By: Christopher Isherwood & Edward Upward ; introduced by Katherine Bucknell ; with images by Graham Crowley.
Contributors: Upward, Edward.
Publisher: Enitharmon Press; Distributed in the USA by Dufour Editions
Published: 1994
Place of publication: London; Chester Springs, Pa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 206
Subjects: Schools -- England -- Fiction.; Country life -- England -- Fiction.; Villages -- England -- Fiction.; Short stories, English.
Description: As Cambridge undergraduates in the mid-1920s, Christopher Isherwood and his old schoolfriend Edward Upward engaged in a literary attack on the dons and the 'poshocracy' - the fashionable and well-heeled students - by creating the bizarre fictional world of Mortmere, a village inhabited by surreal characters modelled on their Cambridge friends and acquaintances.

The rector, Casmir Welken, resembles a 'diseased goat' and breeds angels in the church belfry; his sidekick Ronald Gunball is a dipsomaniac and an unashamed vulgarian; Sergeant Claptree, assisted by Ensign Battersea, keeps the Skull and Trumpet Inn; the mannish Miss Belmare, domineering and well starched, is sister to the squire, and Gustave Shreeve is headmaster of Frisbald College for boys.

There are engrossing accounts of the writing of the Mortmere stories in Isherwood's Lions and Shadows and in Upward's No Home but the Struggle, but the stories have never before been published - with the one exception of Upward's 'The Railway Accident'.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.