Happy-Thought Hall
A group of friends set out to build the perfect winter retreat, and the scheme collapses almost at once into arguments over cost and floor plans: one wing for the bachelors, another for the young ladies and their chaperons. What they end up with instead is a peculiar old country house, promptly christened Happy-Thought Hall. F. C. Burnand fills it with a house party worth watching: the narrator acting as host, Cazell, Boodels, Milburd, Chilvern the architect, Boodels’s deaf grandmother and her ear-trumpet, and Jenkyns Soames, Professor of Scientific Economy, who insists on lecturing the company on the pleasures of wealth. The comedy lives in digression, running jokes, and the small disasters of Victorian etiquette rather than in plot, with the author’s own drawings scattered throughout.
