There’s a Jeeves and Wooster story about eggs and how if someone were really ready to give it a go they could start with one set of hens, and then their egg business would have to grow exponentially.
This is the novel Wodehouse wrote some 15 years earlier (his first novel, apparently) that really gave this idea a go.
This book begins with Jeremy Garnet, a writer of light fiction (and of middling talent), in a funk. He comes across a friend, Ukridge, who breaks down the whole chickens scheme and convinces him that London is done, the countryside is in, and they should move out together and start a farm. The whole business with the chickens being that exponential growth thing.
On the train there Garnet notices a pretty young woman reading his book and making slightly critical, but ultimately positive comments about it and he instantly falls in love with her. She likes him ok, but her father is the real issue, a local professor.
In the meantime, chickens is actually a harder business.
This book is a nice little indictment of that penchant of rich and middle class people to believe that their advantages in life are not only entirely of their own doing (there’s a running theme in which Jeremy Garnet’s total ignorance about chickens is an advantage because he’s not hampered with preconceived notions about chickens) and also applicable to anything they wish to succeed at. It’s also a little indictment on the arrogance of city folk, kind of.
It’s also clearly a first novel, with their inherent limitations.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Love-Among-Chickens-Collectors-Wodehouse/dp/1590206789/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=love+among+the+chickens&qid=1557493589&s=gateway&sr=8-1)
