ABSTRACT
Here is a jovial jeu d’esprit in the light-hearted satirical prose manner of James Smith’s ‘Grimm’s Ghost’, a series of comic sketches which ran in the New Monthly in the 1820s. 1 After the publication of the Rejected Addresses, the elder Smith was not as prolific as his fearsomely productive brother. James confined himself to collaborations with the comic actor Charles Mathews on his English Opera House entertainments 2 and occasional comic essays and verses for the New Monthly, most notably – ‘Grimm’s Ghost’ apart – his ‘London Lyrics’ on ephemeral metropolitan themes. The ‘Grimm’ series is vivacious social comedy of manners and proved to be another hit for Smith. Both in its amused but tolerant and urbane mockery of the pretensions of bourgeois society and in its occasional use of the epistolary mode, it resembles a prose version of the manner and Horatian tone pioneered by Christopher Anstey’s New Bath Guide (1766) and used more recendy to such effect in N. T. H. Bayley’s Rough Sketches of Bath (1817) and Thomas Moore’s The Fudge Family in Paris (1818).
