The journal of Squire Amos Haggard is an account of the perpetually drunken, hard-up Squire's exploits as he seeks to stay one step ahead of his creditors and restore his family's fortune by marrying his dimwitted son Roderick to a wealthy heiress — not forgetting, meanwhile, to keep a faithful record of the local weather and any interesting deaths. Hidden for many years in the Muniment Room at Haggard Hall, it was discovered and edited for publication by Michael Green.
Or rather, the Squire was invented by Green as a young reporter on the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, as a parody of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diarists like Samuel Pepys and William Hickey. His Journal was originally a humorous column in the Northampton paper, then nationally in the Daily Telegraph as part of the Peter Simple column. The Journal was published in book form in 1975, and again, substantially revised, in 2001. The first chapter of the revised edition can be found online
.
It was adapted twice for television: Once in the 1960s for the BBC, then for Yorkshire TV in 1990 under the title of Haggard.
Tropes:
- Antiquated Linguistics: Like a real 18th-century diarist, the Squire is in the habit of abbreviatg. any word endg. with "ing".
- Ascended Extra: In the 1975 book the Squire's servant Grunge hardly gets a mention, but he's one of the main characters of the 1990 series and features prominently in the revised edition.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Roderick's fiancée, Fanny Foulacre, is a plain girl, but has a bosom of 'strikg. proportions'.
- Fake Aristocrat: While overseas, Haggard poses as a full-on aristocrat rather than a mere country squire.
- Hormone-Addled Teenager: Roderick is 21, but otherwise fits the trope exactly; obsessed with getting laid, he sets off the main plot of the book by trying to seduce Fanny before they are married.
- Historical Domain Character: Haggard occasionally runs into them, at one point fighting a duel with Lord Sandwich (he cheats).
- Impossibly Tacky Clothes: In Paris, Haggard and Roderick buy clothes that are the French take on how an English aristocrat would dress. They're apparently purple and orange, with so much lace that they keep tripping over it.
- Impoverished Patrician: The Squire is heavily in debt, thanks to his expenditure on drink, women and bribing members of Parliament.
- It Will Never Catch On: In one entry, Grunge predicts that "perhaps in about 223 years" all Europe will unite in a single market, allowing French wine to be imported without customs duties. Haggard retorts that he would rather pay double or treble for brandy than see Britain allied to the "mincing pederasts, papists and dancing-masters in Europe... our lives subject to the whim of envious French officials." At the time that edition of the Journal was published, Grunge's prediction was the correct one, and Haggard's the entertaining error. Twenty years on, the positions are reversed.
- The Loins Sleep Tonight: Following a too-close encounter with an angry husband, Roderick finds to his horror that he's become impotent. Trying to restore his virility leads the Haggards into a number of chaotic situations.
- My Eyes Are Up Here: Haggard tells Roderick not to ogle Fanny's bosom when they're trying to get on her father's good side.
- Papa Wolf: Fanny's father, Sir Joshua, is very protective of his daughter — and when dealing with the Haggards, his caution is entirely justified.
- Shout-Out: While the Squire is travelling in Central Europe, his list of daily deaths includes notables named Dracula and Frankenstein.
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: The Squire is an appalling person, even by the standards of his time.
- The 'Verse: Michael Wharton, the main writer of the Peter Simple column, set many of his vignettes in the fictitious town of Stretchford. Though Haggard's journal was written by a different author, it too has occasional references to Stretchford.
- You Don't Want to Catch This: Grunge scares off an encampment of Roguish Romani by pretending he has the plague.
