Spectator competition winners: lessons in citizenship from Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse

In Competition No. 3278, you were invited to supply a well-known writer’s response to the question what makes the perfect citizen?

In 1970, as part of a school project, a ten-year-old wrote to Charles M. Schulz to ask him a similar question. But the boy asked what makes a ‘good’ rather than ‘perfect’ citizen, and this is how the Peanuts creator replied: ‘I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen than it has ever been before. Certainly all any of us can do is follow our own conscience and retain faith in our democracy…’.

Fifty years on, with our democratic institutions looking distinctly green around the gills, and faith in politicians at an all-time low, lessons in citizenship came pouring in from a pleasingly wide range of writers, from Ernest Hemingway to Bernadine Evaristo. Creditable Hemingways – from D.A. Prince, A.H. Harker and Paul D.