The Little Nugget

The Little Nugget is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in Munsey's Magazine in August 1913, before being published as a book in the UK on 28 August 1913 by Methuen & Co., London, and in the US on 10 January 1914 by W.J. Watt and Company, New York. An earlier version of the story, without the love interest, had appeared as a serial in The Captain between January and March 1913 under the title The Eighteen-Carat Kid; this version was not published in the US until August 1980, when it appeared in a volume entitled The Eighteen-Carat Kid and Other Stories. The Little Nugget was reprinted in the Philadelphia Record on 12 May 1940............ The "Little Nugget" of the title is one Ogden Ford, a spoilt, unpleasant child of overindulgent, wealthy parents; he is so dubbed due to his immense ransom value, being a prime target for kidnappers. The novel revolves around numerous schemes to kidnap the boy, for various ends. It is essentially a comic romance, whose hero, Peter Burns, leaves behind a comfortable lifestyle to become a master at the boy's school, thanks to his scheming fiancée, and finds the change of lifestyle invigorating. Ogden and his mother Nesta also appear in Piccadilly Jim (1918).