The City of Beautiful Nonsense

The City of Beautiful Nonsense was a best-selling novel written by Ernest Temple Thurston. It became the inspiration for two films (see below for details). It was originally published by Chapman and Hall in 1909,[1] but because the copyright has expired, the text of the book is now in the public domain.[2] There was a "new and illustrated" edition, with illustrations by Emile Verpilleux, published a year later in 1910. It may fairly be described as a sentimental novel: Temple Thurston himself wrote that "To many, from the first page to the last, it had not the faintest conception of reality, and indeed has earned for me the classification of sentimentalist". This was in the Author's Note to the sequel, entitled The World of Wonderful Reality, published a decade later in 1919. His obituary in The Times (20 March 1933) stated that "there were those who might suggest that sentimentalism was too evident in Temple Thurston's work". As well as being a vehicle for Edwardian romanticism, the novel shares the Roman Catholic faith of its author with its main characters. It is a tale of two cities: mainly Edwardian London – the sidelights on life in London for the shabby genteel are interesting – but also Venice.