Vice Versâ; or, A Lesson to Fathers was written by “F. Anstey,” the pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), a popular British humorist and satirist.

The plot of Vice Versâ will be a familiar one to modern readers: a father and son switch bodies. Paul Bultitude, Esq., makes the mistake of holding the Garuda Stone and saying to his son Dick that “I only wish, at this very moment, I could be a boy again, like you. Going back to school wouldn’t make me unhappy, I can tell you.”¹ This turns Paul into an exact duplicate of Dick. Dick then holds the Stone and wishes that he could look like his father, and his wish is granted. The predictable wackiness ensues, with father and son discovering that the other’s life is not nearly so easy and carefree as it appeared. Paul is forced to go to Dick’s school and suffer under the attentions of the awful Headmaster Grimstone, while Dick gallivants about, enjoying the privileges of the wealthy bourgeois, until he discovers that Paul, too, has responsibilities, which Dick is incapable of fulfilling. Vice Versâ ends with Paul’s youngest son grasping the Garuda Stone and wishing that “Papa and buzzy Dicky back again as–as they were before.”² Paul and Dick, having gained insight into the other’s lives, grow closer to and more tolerant of each other, and the family is happier as a result.

Vice Versâ was Guthrie’s first novel, so it is at least understandable that the comedic touch present in Brass Bottle is missing in Vice Versâ. There is comedy, of a sort, in Vice Versâ, but it is broad, lumbering, ham-handed and telegraphed. Audiences of the nineteenth century were more appreciative of Guthrie’s humor than modern readers are likely to be; the English author Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) died from a stroke brought on by laughing too hard at Vice Versâ, but few readers today are in such danger. Interestingly, the book is far more effective, and even affecting, in its non-comedic moments. The opening sequence between the father and son, who are incapable of communicating with or even understanding each other, is painful to read; anyone who has felt that gap between parent and child will wince and suffer sympathetic pains while reading it. The passages at Dick’s school, while likely not as immediately painful to American readers, may be similarly discomforting for English readers, at least for older readers who suffered through the experience. C.S. Lewis wrote of Vice Versâ that “it is the only truthful school story in existence. The machinery of the Garuda Stone really serves to bring out in their true colors (which would otherwise seem exaggerated) the sensations which every boy had on passing from the warmth and softness and dignity of his home life to the privations, the raw and sordid ugliness, of school.”³ And, indeed, Vice Versâ does portray Paul’s school as a thoroughly wretched place. But Dick’s misery stretches over two hundred pages, an excess of emotional pain for most readers. Paul, before switching bodies with Dick, is overbearing and aggressively unlikable, and Paul’s youngest son speaks in dialogue which a nineteenth century reader might have felt was amusing or adorable, but which the modern reader is likely to find aggravatingly twee.

Despite the presence of the youngest son and the Happily Ever After ending of the novel, Vice Versâ deserves critical consideration as the first subversive novel for children in the nineteenth century. As Nicholas Tucker notes, Vice Versâ is not just an attack on the Victorian educational system, it is an attack on Victorian parenting methods.

Yet as the book makes clear, such generosity, particularly where Victorian fathers were concerned, was often lacking. It is this angry accusation that forms the basis for Anstey's novel: that is why it is dedicated to the British Paterfamilias in person, and subtitled "A Lesson to fathers."

For to be blunt, Mr. Bultitude has little interest in what happens to his son Dick, and what is more, makes this quite plain. Had Dick's mother been alive, Anstey writes, her loving tact might have led to less strained relationships between father and son (p. 6). But she is dead before the story begins, thus neatly avoiding unthinkable complications had Dick, in his father's body, been required to share the marriage bed with his own mother. Left on his own, Dick scavenges for affection from cook, servant, or younger brother and sister. From his own father, he receives nothing.⁴

¹ F. Anstey, Vice Versâ: Or, A Lesson to Fathers (New York: D. Appleton, 1882), 26.

² Anstey, Vice Versâ, 332.

³ C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955), 39.

⁴ Nicholas Tucker, “Vice Versa: The First Subversive Novel For Children,” Children’s Literature in Education 18, no. 3 (Sept. 1987): 139-147.