A friend of both the Marxes and the Gladstones, a lovable but preposterous figure, with a quiverful of children and advice to anyone who would listen, Martin Tupper was in many ways the quintessential Victorian. In 1842 he wrote the first of a series entitled "Proverbial Philosophy", a moral self-improvement manual, full of hearty evangelism - somewhere between "The Road Less Travelled" and "The Little Book of Calm" - which became a multi-million bestseller. Few people today have heard of Tupper but in his own time his name was a household word. Know Tupper, know something interesting, richly comic and telling about Victorian taste and sensibility.
