Biting Fleet Street satire
WAUGH, Evelyn. Scoop. London: Chapman and Hall. 1938.
8vo. Original red and black marbled cloth lettered in gilt on spine with second issue dust wrapper; wrapper with some sunning, chipping, closed tears and creases, else a very good bright copy with author's inscription to ffep.
First edition, second issue with "as" on last line of p. 88, inscribed by Waugh on front-free endpapaer "H H Rawles from Evelyn".
Signed and inscribed copies of Scoop are extremely scarce. Very soon after publication, Waugh went to Mexico to research Robbery Under Law, and his absence from Britain may account for the paucity of inscribed and signed copies.
One of Waugh's most celebrated novels – and one of the best-known comic novels on the theme of journalism – Scoop was based on Waugh's period in Abyssinia covering the Italian invasion in 1935 for the Daily Mail. Owing to a case of mistaken identity, the novel's main character William Boot is employed by Lord Copper, the owner of the Daily Beast to cover the war in the fictitious African country of Ishmaelia and to steal a march over his deadly rival, Lord Zinc, the owner of the Daily Brute; William Boot is based upon Bill Deedes (later Lord Deedes), who covered the Abyssinian war for the Morning Post (and later became editor of the Daily Telegraph), and the Daily Beast and the Daily Brute are based upon the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Lords Copper and Zinc, in turn, owe much to Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, the owners of the Daily Mail and Daily Express respectively. As The Oxford Companion to English Literature notes, Scoop is "a brilliantly comic satire of Fleet Street ethics and manners, and on the battle for readership between The Beast and The Brute".
Davis et al., A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, XV
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