The Schartz-Metterklume Method by Saki
Quick answer: The Schartz-Metterklume Method by Saki: full summary with the ending, Lady Carlotta's governess imposture, the history lesson gone wild, themes and the craft of farce.
A commanding woman on a station platform decides that the well-dressed stranger who just stepped off the train must be the governess she is expecting, and the stranger, Lady Carlotta, sees no reason to correct so confident an error. The Schartz-Metterklume Method, from Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), is Saki's sunniest imposture comedy, in which the punishment for snobbery is getting exactly the governess you deserve.
It is a staple of school anthologies because it is clean, quotable fun; it is worth a writer's closer look because the entire plot is generated by one character trait meeting another, with no machinery at all: pretension supplies the mistake, and mischief declines to fix it.
The story in brief, ending included
Lady Carlotta, left on the platform of a small wayside station while her train idles onward without her, is accosted by the imposing Mrs. Quabarl, who takes her for Miss Hope, the new governess, and sweeps her into the family car. Lady Carlotta, a woman whose philosophy runs to interfering on behalf of the oppressed, whether overworked carthorses or maligned strangers, and who dislikes being organised, adopts the role on the spot. At the house she meets the measure of her employers: the Quabarls are advertisers of their children's sensitivities and their own advanced ideas, and they explain grandly that they want history taught not as dates but as living experience. The new governess assures them she teaches by her own system, the Schartz-Metterklume method, in which children act out historical events for themselves.
The method is demonstrated the next morning. Mrs. Quabarl finds her offspring deep in a living history lesson: the Roman episode of the seized Sabine women, cast locally, with the lodge-keeper's small daughters filling the abducted roles, restrained atop the wolf-skin rug, while a Quabarl child, perched on guard, explains that resistance is historically inaccurate. The scandalised household erupts; Lady Carlotta observes that the children will at least never forget the lesson, which was, after all, the requested outcome. Dismissed on the spot, indeed dismissed before she can be paid, she remarks that her luggage, containing among other things a leopard cub she is delivering to a friend, will have to be sent after her, an inventory that finishes Mrs. Quabarl entirely. Lady Carlotta strolls to the next station and resumes her interrupted journey; the real Miss Hope, who had arrived at the wrong day or the wrong house through the muddle, presumably absorbs the family's chastened mood. At her destination, greeted with sympathy for the tiresome delay, Lady Carlotta pronounces the wait not tiresome at all. That is the ending: no exposure, no apology, one household permanently vaccinated against its own grandeur.
The characters
Farce runs on collisions of temperament, and Saki machines his cast precisely.
Themes: snobbery self-punished, education satirised
The primary theme is imposture as comeuppance. Mrs. Quabarl's error is not bad luck; it is her character operating normally, assigning identities to people by their apparent station and never verifying, because verification is for equals. Lady Carlotta merely declines to interrupt a snob's self-service. The story's justice is elegant: everything that happens to the Quabarls is something they asked for, from the governess they appointed by assumption to the vivid history lesson they specified by fashion.
The second target is progressive-sounding education adopted as ornament. The Quabarls do not hold ideas; they display them, and Saki's joke is to take their display literally, delivering exactly the immersive, unforgettable history they advertised wanting. An essay can note the doubled satire: the method is absurd, yet it works, the children are engaged and the lesson unforgettable, so the story simultaneously mocks fashionable pedagogy and suggests it is still livelier than the genuine article. The final feather is the leopard cub: Lady Carlotta's real life is more improbable than her imposture, which quietly asks who was ever the fraud.
The craft: premise economy and the unflappable centre
Study how little machinery this plot needs. One mistaken identity, accepted rather than engineered; every subsequent scene is character friction. Saki's discipline is that Lady Carlotta never lies beyond the minimum: she invents one proper noun, the Schartz-Metterklume method, whose Germanic weight does all the authenticating, and otherwise simply allows the Quabarls' assumptions to keep manufacturing the situation. Farce built this way never creaks, because nothing is load-bearing except personality. The craft point for contest writers, and one that rubric-based judges scoring character and storytelling notice quickly, is that the funniest scenes here are also the ones doing the character work; comedy and revelation ride the same sentences.
The other lesson is the value of an unflappable centre. Surrounded by outrage, Lady Carlotta maintains perfect calm, and the story's humour is generated by everyone else's temperature rising around her stillness. When you write farce, give the chaos a fixed point to swirl against; the still character converts noise into meaning. And note the ending's speed: dismissal, luggage inventory, stroll to the station, one line at the destination. Saki exits at a walk while lesser comedies sprint past their own best stopping point.
Lady Carlotta and Saki's gallery of imposters
Saki wrote imposture repeatedly, Clovis's fake secretaryship in The Unrest-Cure at the cruel end of the scale, and this story at the benign end, and the constant is that his imposters never seek profit, only the restoration of proportion. Lady Carlotta takes nothing, not even her wages, and leaves behind the one thing the Quabarls lacked: an accurate experience of not being in charge. Among his heroines she stands nearly alone in being an adult who wins, in a body of work where victory usually belongs to children, animals and Clovis, which perhaps explains the story's unusual warmth. The joke ends with everyone alive, one ego bruised, and history, for once in a Saki story, merely re-enacted.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, name the premise precisely: mistaken identity accepted, not engineered, so the victim's snobbery powers the plot.
- Cite the invented method's name as satire of pedagogic fashion, authority conferred by sound alone.
- Use the leopard cub as the closing characterisation stroke: the truth is wilder than the imposture.
- Writers: keep your imposter's lies minimal and let the victim's assumptions do the plotting.
- Anchor farce with one unflappable character; calm at the centre makes surrounding panic legible and funny.
- In essays, compare with The Unrest-Cure to map Saki's scale of imposture from corrective to cruel.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a stranger is confidently mistaken for someone expected, a tutor, an inspector, a consultant, and plays along without ever volunteering a lie beyond one invented technical term. Let the household's own pretensions script every scene, and end with the imposter strolling away unexposed.
Questions
What is the Schartz-Metterklume method in the story?
An invented teaching system Lady Carlotta improvises on the spot, in which children learn history by acting it out themselves. Its impressive-sounding name is the only credential it has, which is exactly Saki's joke about educational fashion.
What happens at the end of The Schartz-Metterklume Method?
After the Quabarl children are found enacting the seizure of the Sabine women with the lodge-keeper's daughters, Lady Carlotta is dismissed. She mentions her luggage includes a leopard cub, strolls to the next station, and resumes her journey unbothered, never revealing who she was.
What is the theme of The Schartz-Metterklume Method?
Snobbery punishing itself. Mrs. Quabarl's refusal to verify anyone beneath her station hands her household to a mischievous aristocrat, and the fashionable ideas she displays are delivered to her literally, with unforgettable results.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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