Mr Pim Passes By

Description

In A. A. Milne's comic novel, Mr Pim Passes By, chaos prevails when the absent minded Mr Pim calls in to see George Marden, owner of Marden House. George is a fine upstanding citizen and a stickler for doing the right thing. He has a devoted wife, Olivia, and is ward to his somewhat flighty niece, Dinah. Quite innocently, Mr Pim upsets the equilibrium of the Marden household when he casually announces that he's recently seen an ex-convict from Australia, named Telworthy. This character sounds awfully like Olivia's first and supposedly deceased husband and if he's really still alive, then Olivia is a bigamist!

A. A. Milne (Alan Alexander) was born in London in 1882 and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1902 he was Editor of Granta, the University magazine, and moved back to London the following year to enter journalism. By 1906 he was Assistant Editor of Punch, a post which he held until the beginning of the First World War when he joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. While in the army in 1917 he started on a career writing plays of which his best known are Mr. Pim Passes By, The Dover Road and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows - Toad of Toad Hall. He married Dorothy de Selincourt in 1913 and in 1920 had a son, Christopher Robin. By 1924 Milne was a highly successful playwright, and published the first of his four books for children, a set of poems called When We Were Very Young, which he wrote for his son. This was followed by the storybook Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, more poems in Now We Are Six (1927) and further stories in The House at Pooh Corner(1928). In addition to his now famous works, Milne wrote many novels, volumes of essays, a well known detective story The Red House Mystery and light verse, works which attracted great success at the time. He continued to be a prolific writer until his death in 1956.