Fluvius Minucius, A Critical Study by Sidney Carton

Thanks to The Sunday Times (not Fluvius Minucius but Catullus)

Title: Fluvius Minucius, A Critical Study

Author: Sidney Carton

Publisher: Oxbridge Press

Source book: The Headmistress by Angela Thirkell (Barsetshire #13)

Mr Carton has been writing his study of the little known works of the fourth century scholar Fluvius Minucius for some time. He finds that borrowing a calf-bound volume of Slawkenbergius’s edition of Fluvius Minucius (pub. Amsterdam 1594) from his neighbour Mr Oriel, the vicar, is extremely helpful. Unfortunately he discovers, to Mr Oriel’s great embarrassment, that the book had been borrowed from Canon Horbury in August 1902. Since The Headmistress was published in 1944, and Canon Horbury had been dead for some years, this almost amounted to theft. 

Canon Horbury’s granddaughter, Miss Sparling, (the eponymous) headmistress of the Hosiers’ Girl’s School, is a considerable Latin scholar in her own right having studied with her grandfather, and finished one of his articles on Fluvius Minucius herself. She forgives Mr Oriel (who is a very nice man and didn’t mean it) his oversight, and goes on to marry Mr Carton.

In Happy Returns Eric Swan (see also Summer Half) suggests that Fluvius Minucius might have been influenced by Scriptor Ignotus of Aterra. Mr Carton does his best to demolish this argument but is confuted at every turn.

Later in Happy Returns Eric produces a copy of a book he has written about a minor Latin poet called Fluvius Minucius as a wedding present for Grace Grantley. I can’t help feeling that this is the author making a huge mistake because surely it would have been mentioned when he corresponded with Mr Carton about Scriptor Ignotus that he, Eric Swan, had also written a book about this little known, and in fact, fictitious Latin poet. Oops.

There is a fictional writer in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy called Slawkenbergius. He was distinguished by the length of his nose, and was a great authority on noses. Unsurprisingly I have not read Tristram Shandy. Thank goodness for the internet. I think we may take it for granted that Angela Thirkell was better read than I am.

Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art