Uploaded November 2017 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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As opening lines go, "Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him" is hard to beat.

This comic classic, written, astoundingly, by a 9-year-old in 1890, remains gloriously in print a full century later. Accompanied by J.M Barrie's famous forward depicting both  author and background, and Posy Simmonds' splendid drawings, it is a child's eye view of the Victorian world like no other: painfully perceptive, pricelessly funny, and published verbatim, misspellings and all.

20-odd printings later, a timeless stocking-stuffer.

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