(The 1964 Chapman & Hall Edition of Scoop, page 9, Preface-my emphasis added) Younger readers must accept my assurance that such people and their servants did exist quite lately and are not pure fantasy. There are today pale ghosts of Lord Copper, Lady Metroland and Mrs. The most anachronistic part is the domestic scene of Boot Magna. The geographical position of Ishmaelia, though not its political constitution, is identical with that of Abyssinia and the description of life among the journalists in Jacksonburg is very close to Addis Ababa in 1935.
I had no talent for this work but I joyfully studied the eccentricities and excesses of my colleagues. In Abyssinia I had served as the foreign correspondent of an English daily newspaper. Of the later I knew nothing at first hand. I tried to arrange a combination of these two wars. Īt the time of writing public interest had just been diverted from Abyssinia to Spain. Other minor themes, then topical, are out of date, in particular the “ideological war,” although some parallels to it might still be found in the Far East. Foreign correspondents, at the time this story was written, enjoyed an unprecedented and undeserved fame. Its early editions bore the subtitle: “A novel about journalists.” This now seems superfluous. This light-hearted tale was the fruit of a time of general anxiety and distress but, for its author, one of peculiar personal happiness. Two years before he was to die in early April of 1966 on Easter Sunday after Mass, Evelyn Waugh wrote a new Preface to his pre-War 1938 novel, Scoop.1 In that brief 1964 Preface and retrospect, he recalls the atmosphere and forebodings of that time leading up to World War II:
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