All posts tagged Jeeves

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
(twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
‘What? Incredulous!’
‘Incredible, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

aged relative
my fluttering old aspen
my dear old mysterious hinter
old ancestor
old flesh and blood
old thicker than water
My dear old faulty reasoner
my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
- Butterfield – his butler
Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
- Bartholomew – her dog
Constable Oates – the local policeman
Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

Grade A soup (content unknown)
a toothsome fish (species unknown)
a salmi of game which
asparagus
a jam omelette
some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
‘Oh, psychological?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The psychology of the individual?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

Bertie
Freddie Widgeon
Bingo Little
Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

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by Simon on December 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, A.B. Filmer, abbreviations, Aberdeen terrier, Anatole, Aunt Dahlia, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Bartholomew, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Black Shorts, Bond Street, braggadocio, Brompton Road, Butterfield, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Charles Dickens, comic novel, Comic simile, Constable Oates, Curzon Street, dictator, Dover Street, Dr Watson, Drones Club, Einstein, Eulalie Soeurs, fascism, Feminism, fiction, Freddie Widgeon, Gloucestershire, gooseflesher, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Hamlet, Harold Pinker, Herbert Jenkins, Hercule Poirot, humour, J. Washburn Stoker, Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster, Junior Ganymede, Keats, King Lear, Kipling, little grey cells, Macbeth, Madeline Bassett, metonymy, Milady's Boudoir, misogyny, Murder Mystery, Mussolini, newts, novel, Ode to the West Wind, Oofy Prosser, Oswald Mosely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Piccadilly, Poirot, Pomona Grindle, Pop Bassett, Provence, Psychology, Queen Victoria, rannygazoo, Rev HP Pinker, Robert Taylor, Roberta Wickham, Roderick Spode, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, silverware, Sir Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett, Somerset Maugham, Spode, Stiffy Byng, Stinker Pinker, the Black Shorts, the Code of the Woosters, the Drones Club, The Junior Ganymede club, the Saviours of Britain, The Secret Adversary, The Sensitive Plant, The Times, Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Uncle Tom Travers, Upon Reading Chapman's Homer, WoosterWorld

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-code-of-the-woosters-p-g-wodehouse/

Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1934)

‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘No.’

‘Bertie.’
‘Hallo?’
‘Ever been hit over the head with a chair?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you soon may be.’
I began to see she was in difficult mood.

‘If cooks would stick to their roasts and hashes,’ I said rather severely, ‘and not waste their time in
psychical research, life would be a very different thing.’

‘Mr Wooster is an agreeable young gentleman, but I would describe him as essentially one of Nature’s bachelors.’

After writing 35 short stories about Jeeves and Wooster (1915 to 1930), ‘Thank You, Jeeves’ is the first of the 11 full-length Jeeves and Wooster novels Wodehouse wrote. All the mannerisms we saw in the short stories are here: farcical plots based on the complicated misunderstandings of posh young people falling in love and managing their eccentric parents, all refracted through the ludicrously upper class attitude of the wonderfully dim and self-deluding narrator, the upper-class idler Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster. And all the usual stylistic elements:

Comically dim references to classical literature

‘Well, let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself…’ I stepped to the door. ‘Jeeves,’ I called down the passage, ‘what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?’
‘Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,’ I said, returning.

And:

‘Jeeves,’ I recollect saying, on returning to the apartment, ‘who was the fellow who on looking at
something felt like somebody looking at something? I learned the passage at school, but it has escaped me.’
‘I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats, who compared his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer to those of stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific’

So it’s a running gag that Bertie regularly wants to quote some gem of English literature but can never remember the actual details. And a variation on it is when characters (often but not always Bertie) offer to quote literary classics at inopportune moments and are told to shut up.

‘What you want on an occasion like this, Chuffy, old man,’ I said, ‘is simple faith. The poet Tennyson tells us…’
‘Shut up,’ said Chuffy. ‘

Or:

‘Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope …’
‘Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.’
‘No, sir.’
‘There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn’t.’
‘Very true, sir.’

Climaxing with:

‘Reminds one of that thing about Lo somebody’s name led all the rest.’
Jeeves coughed. He had that informative gleam of his in his eyes.
‘Abou ben Adhem, sir.’
‘Have I what? said old Stoker, puzzled.
‘The poem to which you allude relates to a certain Abou ben Adhem, who, according to the story, awoke one night from a deep dream of peace to find an angel…’
‘Get out!’ said old Stoker, very quietly.
‘Sir?’
‘Get out of this room before I murder you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And take your angels with you.’
‘Very good, sir.’

Forgetting words

Forgetting famous quotations is one aspect of the broader comic topos of Bertie forgetting words and needing to be corrected.

I was impatient with this – what the dickens is the word I want?

Analysing this (if analysing is the word I want)…

What is Jeeves, after all? A valet. A salaried attendant. And a fellow simply can’t go on truckling – do I mean truckling? I know it begins with a ‘t’ – to his valet for ever.

I wished to disabuse him (if disabuse is what I’m driving at) of the idea that any such infatuation existed.

Most of the time he just sat and champed in a sort of dark silence, like a man with something on his mind. And when he did speak it was with a marked what-d’you-call-it.

What are those sore things people find themselves in?’
‘Straits, sir.’
‘I am in the sorest straits, Jeeves.

‘No imagination, that kid. No vision. I’ve often noticed it. His fancy is – what’s the word?’
‘Pedestrian, sir?’
‘Exactly.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘we require your co-operation and advice.’
‘Very good, sir.’
‘To begin with, let me give you a brief synopsis… do I mean synopsis?’
‘Yes, sir. Synopsis is perfectly correct.’
‘… a brief synopsis, then, of the position of affairs.’

‘You wanted to hit him over the head with a spade or something. All wrong. What is needed here is… what’s the word, Jeeves?’
‘Finesse, sir.’
‘Exactly. Carry on, Jeeves.’

The ‘the’

A really prominent part of Bertie’s diction (defined as: ‘the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing’) is his insistent use of ‘the’ where a possessive pronoun such as ‘my’ or ‘his’ would be more conventional;

I shook the head.

I raised the eyebrows.

I confess that it was in sombre mood that I assembled the stick, the hat, and the lemon-coloured some half-hour later and strode out into the streets of London.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that a great peace enveloped the soul.

Where Bertram could find only a tentative ‘Pip-pip!’ she bounded forward, full of speech, and grabbed the old hand warmly.

I wiped the brow. ‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘this calls for careful thought.’

At seven on the dot, accordingly, I stepped aboard the yacht and handed the hat and light overcoat to a passing salt. It was with mixed feelings that I did so, for conflicting emotions were warring in the bosom.

It being reasonable to suppose by then that the coast was clear, I poked the head up over the desk.

The pride of the Woosters

Bertie’s comic exaggeration of his family’s, and his, abilities:

As I turned the corner into Piccadilly, I was a thing of fire and chilled steel; and I think in about another half-jiffy I should have been snorting, if not actually shouting the ancient battle cry of the Woosters, had I not observed on the skyline a familiar form.

This parting of the ways with Jeeves had made me feel a bit as if I had just stepped on a bomb and was trying to piece myself together again in a bleak world, but we Woosters can keep the stiff upper lip.

Half a dozen sentences start with the formula ‘we Woosters’ before going on to boast of their accomplishments. This exaggerated reverence of the Wooster lineage and qualities struck me as new-ish, or made more prominent for this book format.

Bertram

Then there are the many times he refers to himself in the third person, mockingly but also seriously, as ‘Bertram’.

Something was being kept from Bertram.

Nothing of the dog in the manger about Bertram.

There was something in his manner that gave me the idea that he considered Bertram eccentric.

Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that he is a man of sudden, strong enthusiasms and that, when in the grip of one of these, he becomes a remorseless machine – tense, absorbed, single-minded.

All this ‘pride of the Woosters’ and referring to himself in the third person like Julius Caesar is, of course, in stark contrast with the opinion of him held by all the other characters who, without exception, think him a fool and an idiot, ‘you poor goof’, ‘you poor ditherer’, ‘damned sooty-faced imbecile’ and many more. A typical opinion being:

‘Bertie!’ he [Chuffy] said, in a sort of moaning way. ‘My God! I might have guessed it would be you. You really are without exception the most completely drivelling lunatic that was ever at large.’

And:

Bertram Wooster is not accustomed to causing convulsions in the gentler sex. As a matter of fact, usually when girls see me, they incline rather to the amused smile, or, on occasion, to the weary sigh and the despairing ‘Oh, are you here again, Bertie?’

Registers

The book makes Bertie aware of the different registers or tones he uses i.e. characters notice and comment on it.

‘I always esteemed you most highly.’
‘You did what? Where do you pick up these expressions?’
‘Well, I suppose from Jeeves, mostly. My late man. He had a fine vocabulary.’

This influence Jeeves has on the speech patterns of those around him becomes a minor recurring theme. When Stoker talks to Bertie on his yacht, a few days after Jeeves has started working for him (Stoker), Bertie notices straightaway that his diction has improved, become more highfalutin’.

I mean to say, this man had had the advantage of Jeeves’s society for only about twenty-four hours, and here he was… talking just like him!

We see this in practice on the occasions when Jeeves explicitly corrects Bertie’s phraseology – or at least suggests alternative and better phrases. This becomes a running gag.

‘I admit that this change of heart is welcome. It has come at the right time. I shall accept his invitation. I regard it as…’
‘The amende honorable, sir?’
‘I was going to say olive branch.’
‘Or olive branch. The two terms are virtually synonymous. The French phrase I would be inclined to consider perhaps slightly the more exact in the circumstances – carrying with it, as it does, the implication of remorse, of the desire to make restitution. But if you prefer the expression “olive branch”, by all means employ it, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’
‘Not at all, sir.’

Or:

‘Can’t you see? It’s all very well for old Stoker to talk – er—’
‘Glibly, sir?’
‘Airily.’
‘Airily or glibly, sir, whichever you prefer.’
‘It’s all very well for old Stoker to talk with airy glibness about marrying us off…’

Jeeves’s role as indicated by his language

Jeeves’s interventions to correct Bertie’s speech, to suggest the correct word or phrase, to supply the quotations Bertie has forgotten, all these are verbal indications or equivalents of his role in the stories.

To put it another way, all the characters have their own idiolects (‘the speech habits peculiar to a particular person’), from Bertie and Chuffy’s absurd poshness, through Sir Rodney Glossop’s outrage, the rough Cockney of the crook Brinkley, and the two examples of Americans – blustering millionaire J. Washburn Stoker and the affronted bright young woman tones of his American daughter, Pauline Stoker.

The point I’m trying to make is that Jeeves’s tone is always unshakeably factual, accurate and complete. Logical and clear and precise, with none of the slang all the other characters are liable to. So his speech is like a lighthouse on an island in a storm, battered by the raging idiolects of all around him, but shining a clear, logical light through every storm and fog. (‘I got the voices but I missed the play of expression. And I’d have given a lot to be able to see it. Not Jeeves’s, of course, because Jeeves never has any.’)

And this clarity of speech and thought is of course a verbal or tonal indicator of the structural role Jeeves plays in the stories, as the controlling mind who masters every situation and finds a solution to every problem.

Slang

Thus Jeeves stands completely aside from the bombardment of posh slang which characterises Bertie’s narrative (and often the dialogue of his posh friends).

As to slang, slang is (mostly) delightful because it is language cavorting and making free with itself. The best kind of slang is a sign of energy and life. And its domination of the text embodies the exuberance and delight of the stories. Whatever’s going on in the plot, we are always delighted with Bertie’s never-ending supply of inventive and entertaining phrases.

‘Jeeves has nothing to say on that or any other subject. We have parted brass-rags.’

‘He had the immortal rind to tell me that if I didn’t give up my banjolele he would resign.’

There never had been anyone like Jeeves, I felt, as I climbed sombrely into the soup and fish, and there never would be.

It was about as juicy a biff as I had had for years.

I removed the lid with as much courtly grace as I could muster up, but the face had coloured with embarrassment and I was more or less gasping for air.

I know that for years and years I have been trying to lend him of my plenty, but he has always steadfastly refused to put the bite on me.

‘Why all this fuss about money? After all, plenty of bust blokes have married oofy girls before now.’

I rose accordingly, and was just about to ankle upstairs…

It is plain to me that Miss Stoker is the one who will require the persuasive word, the nicely reasoned argument – in short, the old oil.

I mean to say, a fellow closely connected by ties of blood with a man who used to walk about on his hands is scarcely in a position, where the question of sanity is concerned, to put on dog and set himself up…

I emitted a hollow g.

I don’t know how long it was that I stood there, rooted to the s.

He stirred in the darkness. I fancy he was mopping the b.

The next moment I was feeling that nothing mattered in this world or the next except about a quart of coffee and all the eggs and b. you could cram onto a dish.

‘What I’m driving at is that you couldn’t by any stretch of the imag. call him slender and willowy.’

In my heart I was convinced that the fellow had gone off his onion.

He would have been on velvet.

I hitched myself into position forty-six in the hope that it would be easier on the f.p’s than the last forty-five, and had another shot at the dreamless.

Then the barrier of kipper gave way, and one of the most devastating yowls of terror I’ve ever heard in my puff ripped through the air.

These breathers with Brinkley take it out of a man.

When he spoke, there was something so subdued, so what you might call quavering, about his voice that I came within a toucher of placing a kindly arm round his shoulder and telling him to cheer up.

I could not only have scoured the face but could have hopped into the old two-seater, which was champing at its bit there, and tooled off to London by road…

Of all the unpleasant contingencies which could have arisen, this seemed to me about the scaliest.

She cheesed it in mid-sentence, deeply moved.

A little note on ‘binge’ which in Bertie’s hands seems to mean something very like that other ’20s and ’30s word, ‘stunt’.

‘What does she seem to feel about this buying the house binge?’

Words had passed. Relations had been severed. The whole binge was irrevocably off.

The plot

The plot is secondary to the manner, really. The point of the stories is Bertie’s ludicrous attitude and the tone of voice. But as to the plot, it is a preposterous farce of the silliest and most entertaining type.

Chuffy loves Pauline Like almost all the short stories (and most farces) it revolves around a frustrated love affair, between Bertie’s chum Marmaduke ‘Chuffy’ Chuffnell and an American heiress, Pauline Stoker, daughter of the calculating multimillionaire J. Washburn Stoker. The plot consists of a whole series of increasingly far-fetched and ridiculous obstacles placed in their way, along with various comic side-plots.

In terms of the core love story, the first obstacle is that Bertie himself was, a few months before the narrative commences, briefly engaged to this Pauline before her father called it off, under the influence of Bertie’s old nemesis, the nerve specialist (or ‘loony doctor’ as Bertie calls him) Sir Roderick Glossop who Bertie fell foul of in several of the short stories. At various points, the narrative makes it seem like Bertie and Pauline have fallen back in love, like the moment when Chuffy comes across them kissing in a garden, which makes Chuffy break off their engagement with all manner of ensuing complications.

In the end they young couple are, of course, happily reunited but not before loads of farcical incidents.

Jeeves leaves Bertie In rather the same way, early on in the narrative the far more important couple of Bertie and Jeeves are separated. As the pretext for this Wodehouse invents the notion that Bertie has become addicted to playing the banjolele, making a racket with his playing and the caterwauling he calls singing. This leads to protests from all his neighbours in the apartment block where he lives, Berkeley Mansions, West 1 (extremely posh Mayfair district of London). When the landlord gives him an ultimatum to either give up playing the banjolele or be evicted, Bertie very improbably says he’d rather move out than quit his artistic destiny.

Everyone goes to Somerset Two things result from this: 1) Bertie takes up an offer from his old pal, Chuffy, to move into one of the many cottages on the latter’s huge estate on the coast of Somerset, Chufnell Hall in the West of England. Almost the entire novel is set on this estate – at the big Hall, in Bertie’s cottage and various other buildings, and in the yacht moored in the harbour, the grand yacht belonging to J. Washburn Stoker who has sailed here to oversee the nuptials of his daughter and Lord Chuffnell (Chuffy). So much for the setting.

Jeeves quits 2) The second major consequence of Bertie’s decision is that Jeeves hands in his notice. In his muted logical way, he also cannot stand the racket of the banjolele and the thought of being locked up in a country cottage with Bertie playing it all day long is not bearable. So Jeeves announces to his shocked master that he is quitting and that he has already found a job working for Chuffy.

Thus all the ingredients are in place for farce. We are at a big country house. The young master is in love with a millionaire’s daughter. Her former fiancé (Bertie) is staying in a cottage in the grounds. And his former, valet, Jeeves, is now working at the house for the young master.

Incidentally, when I read that Jeeves quits and leaves I was sad because he is the anchor of the stories but need not have been because he, in fact, crops up in more or less every sticky situation and provides plans and solutions for everything. So he is pretty much as present in the narrative as in the short stories.

Complications

Now, not only is Chuffy in love with Pauline, but he is skint (broke, penniless). His estate is worth a fortune but he has no ready money. So he is negotiating a business deal whereby his fiancée’s father (J. Washburn) will buy the estate and lease it to Glossop to set up a sanatorium (that popular 1920s and ’30s’ institution) there. So it’s vital for Chuffy to keep both older men onside.

Also, Bertie discovers that although the young couple love each other, Chuffy hasn’t yet plucked up the nerve to propose to her because he is aware he is broke, so he wants to wait till the deal goes through. Typical of the farcical goings-on is that when Jeeves informs Bertie of this, Bertie conceives one of his cunning plans which is to arrange for Chuffy to see Bertie kissing Pauline in the garden which should trigger an outburst of passionate love and their engagement. Of course this goes wrong when the person who witnesses the kiss is none other than the girl’s father, J. Washburn Stoker, who is immediately convinced that Pauline is still in love with Bertie!

Meanwhile, both households have small boys of a similar age, for with Chuffy lives his Aunt Myrtle who has a young son, Seabury, while J. Washburn has brought over his young son, Dwight. Bertie hates children so he is delighted to hear from Jeeves that the boys started fighting and their fathers joined in, leading to Stoker being banned from Chufnell Hall, and retiring to his yacht anchored in the harbour.

This kicks off a major plot strand which is that Stoker decides to keep his daughter under a kind of house arrest, confining her to the yacht. But (as I write this I can see how improbable it is, but it works in the narrative) Jeeves swaps employment from Chuffy to Stoker, becoming his valet (!?) and in this capacity bears a love letter Chuffy has written to Pauline.

Touched by the letter, Pauline pops into a swimming costume, slips over the side of the yacht, swims to shore and the first thing we know about this is when Bertie arrives that evening at his cottage and finds her in his bed. At moments like this Wodehouse becomes bedroom farce and you can imagine the whole thing on the stage.

After he’s recovered from his initial surprise, Bertie does the honourable thing and says he’ll go and sleep in the car. But this triggers a comic sequence where he is plagued by the dim local police sergeant, Sergeant Voules, and his even dimmer constable (who happens to be his nephew) Constable Dobson. First of all they spot the broken window in Bertie’s cottage where Pauline broke in, and quiz him about that, Bertie assuring them there is no burglar within. Then, when Bertie goes to sleep in the car, he is woken by the flashlight of the sergeant who saw someone suspicious prowling around. And then when Bertie can’t sleep in the car and so removes to another outhouse, he is woken again by the sergeant and constable.

Full comic potential is milked from this situation because the cops tell Chuffy who arrives and declares Bertie must be drunk, and so the three of them pick him up, despite his protestations, and insist on carrying him back to the cottage and up to his bedroom. Of course the reader is anxiously expecting them to all discover Pauline in Bertie’s bed but, equally inevitably, she has made herself scarce and so all passes without mishap.

Except that Pauline had only been hiding and she emerges from her hiding place just as Chuffy returns and captures Bertie and Pauline apparently red-handed. Seeing Pauline wearing Bertie’s pyjamas, Chuffy draws the wrong conclusion (that they’ve been dallying) but when she realises this is what he’s thinking, Pauline is outraged with him for thinking so badly of her, the couple have a flaring standup row declaring the whole affair is off, Chuffy mistimes his steps and falls down the stairs and storms out into the night.

Ooops. Pauline decides the whole thing has been a mistake, slips back into her bathing costume and sets off to swim back out to the yacht. Meanwhile none other than the millionaire himself, Stoker, turns up at the cottage, having discovered that Pauline has absconded and – having witnessed them kissing in the garden – suspecting she’s made for Bertie’s cottage. Bertie is able to honestly say she isn’t there and show him round to prove it. Stoker grudgingly accepts this and he and Bertie are sort of friendly, shaking hands etc.

The next day Bertie is surprised to receive a gracious invitation from Stoker to have dinner on his yacht and prides himself on having befriended the rich man. In fact it’s to mark the birthday of little Dwight. Bertie assumes the man has realised what a good chap he is, dresses smartly and gets rowed out to the yacht. But he is surprised that nobody else has been invited and, when Stoker shows him round the yacht and shows off one of the grand bedrooms, Bertie is surprised to find himself locked in. He has been kidnapped!

This is because, after leaving Bertie’s cottage the night before, Stoker got back to his yacht and discovered Pauline had returned and learns all about her hiding out at Bertie’s cottage i.e. he lied to him, so he draws the conclusion that the pair must still be in love.

He has kidnapped Bertie in order to keep an eye on him until the wedding to Pauline can be arranged. Bertie is feeling very low about all this when who should unlock and enter his cabin but… Jeeves! So this explains why he had (improbably enough) to be made to enter Stoker’s employment – so he can act as the genie who releases Bertie.

He does this through a further elaborate plan which is to have farcical consequences. It turns out that there is an entertainment group of minstrels who ‘black up’ to look like African Americans, touring the West Country, and Stoker has invited them over to his yacht to perform songs and sketches for his son (it’s an indication of how big the yacht is that it can accommodate so many people and such a show).

Anyway, Jeeves suggests that Bertie ‘blacks up’, using black boot polish, to look like one of the minstrels and so get smuggled off the boat when they all leave. The narrative in fact quickly jumps through all the practicalities of this, just telling us that the plan worked and jumping to Bertie safe and sound and back at his cottage.

However, there is a further bout of mayhem, this time genuinely strange. Ever since Jeeves quit, Bertie has been employing a new valet named Brinkley who, as the weeks have passed, he realises he doesn’t like. In fact he’s come to realise the man is something of a left-winger, a revolutionary, a Bolshevik, who regards him as a member of the parasite idle rich class.

Still, it’s a bizarre and inexplicable part of the plot when Bertie is upstairs trying to wash the boot polish off his face when he hears a huge rumpus downstairs and discovers that Brinkley has come back from a night down the pub roaring drunk and is smashing up the cottage! What? Not only that but when Bertie appears to him, he is of course still in blackface and the drunk Brinkley decides he is a devil and chases him up the stairs brandishing a carving knife! What!?

Bertie barricades himself in his bedroom from this maniac who blunders back downstairs and then smashes a lantern in order to set the cottage on fire!! What!??

Bertie is forced to make an escape through the cottage window and away, escaping fire and maniac. Now what? He has only the clothes he’s wearing, no ready cash, and his face is still black. Now Bertie has realised (in fact Jeeves told him) that mere soap and water won’t get the boot polish off his face. What he needs to get it off is butter. So he sneaks up to the Hall and knocks at the back door hoping to get a servant to give him some butter, but when the scullery maid opens it and sees a Black man, she has hysterics and faints.

So Bertie goes round to the front of the Hall. His best hope is to beg Chuffy for butter but he hesitates to knock on the door and terrify another servant. So he awaits events. And something indeed happens for what happens next is the front door opens and Sir Roderick emerges, and angrily departs.

Bertie manages to see Jeeves who explains that the brat Seabury had kicked up a fuss when he wasn’t invited to Dwight’s party and so, in an effort to placate him (and suck up to his mother, Lady Chuffnell) Sir Roderick had black up as well and put on a show. But not only did Seabury not like it but he set a trap, he buttered part of the Hall outside his door so that when Sir Roderick departed, he slipped and landed on his bottom. This made him very angry, Lady Chuffnell defended her son, and the upshot is that Sir Roderick was kicked out of the Hall, late at night, with nowhere to stay.

So we now have two posh men wandering round the grounds with blacked-up faces. See what I mean by farce?

I forgot to mention that much earlier in the evening, Jeeves, having rescued Bertie, told him he could clean and his face and catch the next available train back to London, where he’ll be safe from Brinkley, Stoker and the lot of them. Obviously, by now, that option has disappeared.

Jeeves suggests that Bertie goes and sleeps in the Dower House where Jeeves will bring him butter in the morning. But when Bertie arrives there, he a) discovers that Brinkley has taken possession of it and b) while he’s wondering what to do next, watches as Sir Roderick – who had obviously sought refuge there too – is unceremoniously booted out by the drunk pyromaniac.

Bertie makes himself known and the two men commiserate their fate, with Sir Roderick for the first time softening his attitude to Bertie. (In a colourful digression, he tells Bertie the Dower House is overrun with animals, including a monkey and hordes of mice, to please young Seabury.)

Sir Roderick asks if he can go to Bertie’s cottage to wash the boot polish off until Bertie tells him it’s been burned to the ground. Bertie further informs him that soap and water won’t be enough. After pondering a while. Sir Roderick suggests that petrol may do the trick and asks if Bertie’s garage is still standing. When told yes, he says he’ll head there to get petrol and a wash. But Bertie superstitiously suspects that if he goes anywhere near the smouldering ruins, he’ll be accosted by the ever-vigilant Sergeant Voules and declines to join him, preferring to go try and get some sleep in the summer-house.

Quite a night!

After a bad night’s sleep, Bertie is starving and so carefully makes his way back to the Hall. Through the window he watches the maid bring a tray of delicious hot breakfast into Chuffy’s empty study ready for the master. Hunger has made him reckless so Bertie breaks into the study and is about to wolf down the breakfast when, inevitably, he hears footsteps, so he ducks down behind the large study table. In fact a whole succession of characters now enter this study, again making it feel very much like a stage farce.

First up is Jeeves. Hearing his voice, Bertie is hugely relieved and pops up. They swap news, Bertie telling him about bumping into Sir Rodney and him going off to Bertie’s garage to try the petrol binge. They’ve just got up to speed when there are more footsteps, Bertie ducks out of sight again, and Mr Stoker is shown in by a servant.

Stoker is very cross with Jeeves who, he’s realised, helped Bertie escape from the yacht. In fact he threatens to wring his neck. But Jeeves, with typical mastery, turns the tables by claiming he did it solely to protect Stoker’s interests, pointing out that what he did was in fact kidnapping, which is a criminal offence in England which made him liable to a fine and possibly imprisonment. Put that way, Stoker backs down and grudgingly thanks Jeeves. He says he’ll go and try to find Bertie at the Dower House (whereas we know he’s hiding under the study desk and overhearing all this).

Barely has Bertie resurfaced than there are more footsteps, he ducks back down, and this time is it Stoker’s daughter, young Pauline! She engages Jeeves in conversation in which we realise learn she has absolutely no interest in marrying Bertie, which is a relief to the hidden eavesdropper. Pauline encourages Jeeves to go about his duties i.e. to leave the room and, as soon as he’s done so, springs on the breakfast which had been brought for Chuffy.

At which point Bertie startles her by springing up from behind the desk. This has a mixed effect. On the downside, it prompts Pauline to let out a yowl of terror. On the plus side, Chuffy finally walks through the door at just this moment and is able to rush to Pauline’s rescue and comfort. In a phrase which strongly suggests the staginess of Wodehouse’s imagination:

It coincided with the opening of the door and the appearance on the threshold of the fifth Baron Chuffnell. And the next moment he had dashed at her and gathered her in his arms, and she had dashed at him and been gathered. They couldn’t have done it more neatly if they had been rehearsing for weeks.

Bertie listens to the pair being revoltingly lovey-dovey before he intervenes. Stripped of the banter the situation is simple: they really do love each other (i.e. are fully reconciled after their bust-up in Bertie’s cottage) but the big problem remains how to persuade her father to let her marry Chuffy. In other words, the plot of more or less every comedy since the ancient Greeks.

And just as they’ve defined the problem, in walks in the shape of Mr Stoker himself. There is lots of dialogue but the bottom line is both young people make it clear that they want to marry. However there are several obstacles: one is that Stoker has argued with Glossop. Bertie is able to intervene and tell Stoker that Glossop himself had a big falling out with Lady Chuffly as a result of being humiliated by Seabury. Because Stoker’s was in a fight with Seabury, this endears Glossop to the American.

The next obstacle is that Stoker recalls Chuffy insulting him to his face, calling him ‘a pop-eyed old swindler’. This is a little hard to wriggle out of, but he said it in the context of the deal falling through. But Stoker keeps up his opposition to Chuffy on the basis that he is a gold-digger only after Pauline’s fortune. Pauline counters this by saying Chuffy very nobly did not propose (because he was poor) until he thought the deal to sell the Hall was agreed, whereupon he would be rich, whereupon he instantly proposed.

Also, Jeeves reappears with a telegram. This has come all the way from American and announces that Stoker’s brother intends to contest the will under which he (Stoker) is set to become a multi-millionaire. Stoker is appalled but Chuffy is over the moon. Why? Because if Stoker doesn’t inherit, then Pauline will not become a millionaire’s daughter, will be much more modestly funded, and so the couple can marry!

‘I’m broke. You’re broke. Let’s rush off and get married.’

Obviously Stoker himself is not so happy. He needs to prove that the men who left him the money, ‘Old George’, was not insane, as the rival inheritors are claiming. To prove this he needs Sir Roderick Glossop to testify in court that George was sane. And yet he’s just had a massive falling-out with Glossop, based on the way their respective sons had a fight. So now he needs to find Sir Roderick and be reconciled to him.

There is then a long comic passage where Stoker asks everyone present if they know where Glossop is, and they all throw out wild speculations until Jeeves, once again, trickles into the room to announce that Sir Roderick Glossop is presently… under arrest! For breaking and entering into Bertie’s garage. And being held in the potting shed in the garden owing to the fact that Sergeant Voules’s house, which also the village police station, was also burned down in the blaze which demolished Bertie’s cottage, so it’s the best place he and Constable Dobson could think of!

This further crushes Stoker because he was planning to bring Glossop into court as a reputable psychiatrist to testify that Old George was sane, and yet here is his ‘expert’, arrested for burglary while all blacked up! He will be laughed out of court. Again there’s a hubbub of suggestions until Bertie rings for Jeeves who, of course, has a plan. He points out that the cops don’t actually know who Glossop is yet, they think he’s one of the minstrels. Although Chuffy is the local Justice of the Peace, Glossop hasn’t yet been brought before him. So if they can liberate Glossop from the potting shed, wash his face and despatch him to London all will be well.

Stoker is full of praise for the plan but Bertie sees that this is the moment to force him to make promises: Bertie extorts Stoker’s word that he will 1) buy Chuffley Hall and 2) give permission for Pauline to marry Chuffy. Once these are in the bag, the plan can proceed.

Jeeves’s plan is to extract Glossop from the potting shed by distracting Constable Dobson by telling him that his paramour, the Hall parlourmaid Mary, was waiting for him in the bushes, and make her even more appealing by announcing she has ham sandwiches and coffee for him. In his absence our team will release Glossop. However, there’s a snag: when the cops spot that Glossop is loose they’ll institute a manhunt. Therefore Jeeves takes everyone’s breath away when he suggests that they replace Glossop with… Bertie! Another posh man in blackface! Even though Dobson will realise he’s a different man he won’t be able to admit it to his boss because he’ll give away the fact that he abandoned his post. Although he’s prepared to make a little sacrifice for his friends, Bertie understandably objects to going to prison for them. But Jeeves logically points out that he cannot be charged for breaking into his own garage! Once the cops realise they’re charging the owner of the property they’ll have to abandon the prosecution.

Sudden conclusion

Then, suddenly and abruptly, the novel is over. Having devoted to pages describing the minutiae of various preceding incidents, the final chapter completely jumps over the enactment of this scheme, the deployment of the parlourmaid, the distracting of Constable Dobbs, the liberation of Sir Rodney, his replacement with Bertie… Instead we find ourselves transported to a few days later when Bertie has just demolished an enormous breakfast in Chuffnell Hall, chatting to Jeeves and it is revealed that everything went like clockwork, up to and including Bertie being brought before Chuffy, sitting on the bench wearing horn-rimmed spectacles in his capacity of Justice of the Peace, who made a stern speech and then let Bertie off without charge, fine or conviction.

As in the short stories, this brief coda also reveals that Jeeves played a larger role in orchestrating events than we realised. That cable from America which threatened to impoverish Stoker and forced him to seek out, liberate and reconcile with Glossop, not to mention promising to buy Chuffnell Hall and allow Chuffy and Pauline to marry – in solving all the problems at play in the story? Jeeves made it up, sent it to a pal in New York who sent it back so as to make it look authentic! As Bertie sums it up:

‘Once again you have shown that there is no crisis which you are unable to handle. A very smooth effort, Jeeves. Exceedingly smooth.’
‘I could have effected nothing without your co-operation, sir.’
‘Tush, Jeeves! I was a mere pawn in the game.’

Jeeves asks whether Bertie plans to stay in the country? No, he’ll return to ‘the metrop’. And will he resume playing the banjolele? No, his banjolele perished in the fire and one was enough. At which point Jeeves announces that he has quit Lord Chuffnell’s employment and could he come and work for Bertie again? Bertram’s joy is unbounded!

The cast

Bertie Wooster – private school, Eton and Oxford
Jeeves – his valet
Sir Rodney Glossop – nerve specialist (i.e early form of psychiatrist) and Bertie’s nemesis, who he describes as that ‘old pot of poison’ and ‘that old crumb’
Marmaduke Chuffnell aka ‘Chuffy’ – the fifth Baron Chuffnell – Bertie was at private school, Eton and Oxford with him
Dowager Lady Chuffnell aka Chuffy’s Aunt Myrtle
Seabury – Aunt Myrtle’s young son – ‘a smallish, freckled kid with aeroplane ears, and he had a way of looking at you as if you were something he had run into in the course of a slumming trip’
J. Washburn Stoker – American millionaire, ‘a cove who always reminded me of a pirate of the Spanish Main – a massive blighter and piercing-eyed, to boot’
Pauline Stoker – his daughter
Dwight Stoker – his young son
Brinkley – Jeeves’s replacement – ‘A melancholy blighter, with a long, thin, pimple-studded face and deep, brooding eyes, he had shown himself averse from the start to that agreeable chit-chat between employer and employed to which the society of Jeeves had accustomed me’ – turns out to be a left-wing, drunkard pyromaniac
Sergeant Voules – ‘a bird built rather on the lines of the Albert Hall, round in the middle and not much above’ – Uncle Ted to..
Constable Dobson – his nephew

Jeeves’s character

You can’t switch Jeeves off when he has something to say which he feels will be of interest. The only thing is to stand by and wait till he runs down.

Old Stoker breathed a bit tensely for a while, then he spoke in almost an awed voice. It’s often that way when you get up against Jeeves. He has a way of suggesting new viewpoints.

And mysterious qualities:

Said old Stoker severely. ‘Get out! We’re busy.’
The remark was addressed to Jeeves, who had come floating in again. It’s one of this man’s most
remarkable properties, that now you see him and now you don’t. Or, rather, now you don’t see him and now you do. You’re talking of this and that and you suddenly sense a presence, so to speak, and there he is.

Choice phrases

He made a noise like a pig swallowing half a cabbage, but refused to commit himself further.

The scullery-maid had set a mark at which others who met me suddenly might shoot in vain. But Pauline eclipsed her completely. She remained in Chuffy’s arms gurgling like a leaky radiator, and it was only quite some little time later that she began to regain anything of a grip on her faculties.

Stoker was staring with his left eye. The other had now closed like some tired flower at nightfall. I couldn’t help feeling that Brinkley must have been a jolly good shot to have plugged him so squarely. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to hit a fellow in the eye with a potato at a longish range. I know, because I’ve tried it. The very nature of the potato, it being a rummy shape and covered with knobs, renders accurate aiming a tricky business.

Credit

‘Thank You, Jeeves’ was published in 1934 by Herbert Jenkins.

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by Simon on December 3, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on December 3, 2025

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Very Good, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1930)

‘The tie, if I might suggest it, sir, a shade more tightly knotted. One aims at the perfect butterfly effect. If you will permit me⁠—’
‘What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this? Do you realize that Mr Little’s domestic happiness is hanging in the scale?’
‘There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.’

‘Great Scott, Jeeves, you seem to know everything.’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’

‘What earthly use do you suppose you are without Jeeves, you poor ditherer?’ (Aunt Dahlia)

This is the third collection of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves short stories, bringing together 11 which had been published in the later 1920s.

Jeeves and the Impending Doom (December 1926)
The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy (April 1926)
Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit (December 1927)
Jeeves and the Song of Songs (September 1929)
Episode of the Dog McIntosh (October 1929)
The Spot of Art (December 1929)
Jeeves and the Kid Clementina (January 1930)
The Love That Purifies (November 1929)
Jeeves and the Old School Chum (February 1930)
Indian Summer of an Uncle (March 1930)
The Ordeal of Young Tuppy (April 1930)

They feature empty-headed posh boy Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster and revolve around the supernatural ability of his impeccably dressed, supremely clever and always-in-command valet, Jeeves, to solve the problems faced by Bertie and his posh boy pals. The stories are almost all narrated by Bertie in his upbeat, slang-rich, posh boy tones which are quite candid about his own shortcomings.

If you ask my Aunt Agatha, she will tell you⁠—in fact, she is quite likely to tell you even if you don’t ask her⁠—that I am a vapid and irreflective chump. Barely sentient, was the way she once described me: and I’m not saying that in a broad, general sense she isn’t right.

The formula

Early on in each story Bertie or a posh young pal of his is faced with a tricky social problem, mostly revolving around entanglements with unsuitable young ladies, or social commitments foisted on them by their aunts which they are trying to wriggle out of. In every instance Bertie calls in Jeeves who comes up with a cunning plan to solve the situation. But there is always a kind of second climax or double take, whereby the initial plan often goes awry but Jeeves is revealed as having anticipated this and put in place an even better, more all-encompassing plan B, so that every story invariably ends with ‘Well done, Jeeves’.

Jeeves and Bertie’s eternal battle over clothes

When I read the earliest stories I thought Jeeves’s insistence on telling Bertie what to wear was one among many foibles, but I came to realise it plays a central role, for at least two reasons. The obvious one is to demonstrate the comic principle that Jeeves is always right and Bertie is always wrong. About everything.

But the deeper reason is that the argument about a piece of clothing which Bertie is frightfully proud of buying but which Jeeves thinks is beyond the pale, these arguments often top and tail the stories, providing a structure and an added layer of comic plot. So that:

The story opens with the pair behaving frostily towards each other over such a squabble with Bertie insisting on his independence and how he is the master and how he will never cave in to Jeeves’s taste; then…
We have the entire central plot of saving Bertie or a buddy from a fate worse than death, and after that’s all sorted out…
The narrative returns to the silly squabble about a tie or a shirt or a pair of spats and Bertie, awed by Jeeves’s triumph at solving the central problem, caves in.

1. It’s part of the comic formula that Bertie starts every story insisting he’s going to show the true Wooster mettle:

‘I mean to say, where does a valet get off, censoring vases…’
‘I mean to say, one has got to take a firm stand from time to time. The trouble with Jeeves is that he tends occasionally to get above himself…’

Bertie’s tone, the comic over-assertion of the man who knows he’s going to lose, is typified by the spat over his moustache in the Hard-Boiled Egg:

I was sorry if Bicky was in trouble, but, as a matter of fact, I was rather glad to have something I could discuss freely with Jeeves just then, because things had been a bit strained between us for some time, and it had been rather difficult to hit on anything to talk about that wasn’t apt to take a personal turn. You see, I had decided—rightly or wrongly—to grow a moustache, and this had cut Jeeves to the quick. He couldn’t stick the thing at any price, and I had been living ever since in an atmosphere of bally disapproval till I was getting jolly well fed up with it. What I mean is, while there’s no doubt that in certain matters of dress Jeeves’s judgement is absolutely sound and should be followed, it seemed to me that it was getting a bit too thick if he was going to edit my face as well as my costume. No one can call me an unreasonable chappie, and many’s the time I’ve given in like a lamb when Jeeves has voted against one of my pet suits or ties; but when it comes to a valet’s staking out a claim on your upper lip you’ve simply got to have a bit of the good old bulldog pluck and defy the blighter…

2. Then there’s the main story in all its complexity, and complete with the double ending I’ve pointed out.

3. And then the comic punchline as Bertie, yet again, gives in to Jeeves’s silent disapproval. At the end of the Hard Boiled Egg adventure, Bertie considers that Jeeves himself didn’t make enough out of the adventure and then… proceeds to give in on the moustache issue.

‘I fancy Mr Bickersteth intends—I judge from his remarks—to signify his appreciation of anything I have been fortunate enough to do to assist him, at some later date when he is in a more favourable position to do so.’
‘It isn’t enough, Jeeves!’
‘Sir?’
It was a wrench, but I felt it was the only possible thing to be done.
‘Bring my shaving things.’
A gleam of hope shone in the man’s eye, mixed with doubt.
‘You mean, sir?’
‘And shave off my moustache.’
There was a moment’s silence. I could see the fellow was deeply moved.
‘Thank you very much indeed, sir,’ he said, in a low voice.

In previous collections Jeeves has interfered to stop Bertie wearing:

a rather sprightly young check suit – ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ (1916)
a blue suit with the faint red stripe – ‘The Artistic Career of Corky’ (1916)
a moustache – ‘Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg’ (1917)
purple socks – ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’ (1922)
a cummerbund – ‘Aunt Agatha Takes the Count’ (1922)
soft-fronted shirts with dress-clothes – in their very first story, ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’ (1916)
coloured spats – ‘Without the Option’ (1925)

In this volume Jeeves triumphs in the matter of:

the new vase – ‘The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy’
Bertie’s bright new plus-fours – ‘Jeeves and the Kid Clementina’

Holiday battles

Also worth mentioning that this battle of wills also extends to holiday destinations, as when Jeeves is disappointed when Bertie cancels their plan to spend Christmas in Monte Carlo and go, instead, to his Aunt Dahlia’s but how, by orchestrating a sequence of unfortunate events, Jeeves manages to get his way in the end.

Or in ‘Jeeves and the Spot of Art’, Jeeves is disappointed when Bertie turns down the offer of a yacht cruise with Aunt Agatha but engineers everything so that they do, as a result of the story’s main adventure, end up going on it.

Psychology

I noted in the novels of Agatha Christie the slow spread through the 1920s of ideas and terms from Freud and his followers. So it’s striking that there’s an entire story here, from 1926, entirely based on the concept of the ‘inferiority complex’, the depth psychology term which is also most used in Christie’s novels. Maybe, for some reason, it struck a chord in popular psychology and culture although, like a lot of the Freudian ideas, it is used in a crude, inaccurate, popularised kind of way.

1. Jeeves and the Impending Doom (1926)

Bertie rescues a politician from a swan.

Bertie is invited by his dreaded Aunt Agatha to go and stay at her place, Woollam Chersey, in Hertfordshire. Here he finds his old school chum Bingo Little has been hired to tutor Aunt A’s difficult son, Thomas. Bingo anxiously tells Bertie to pretend not to know him because Agatha has such a low opinion of Bertie that if she learns Bingo is his friend, she’ll sack him.

But the centre of the story is that Aunt Agatha is also entertaining a very important guest, a Cabinet Minister named A.B. Filmer.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”

Aunt A has tasked Bingo with making sure her difficult son, Thomas, doesn’t cause trouble.

As a result Bingo is super-stressed. Both Bertie and Jeeves tell him he simply mustn’t let the little rascal out of his sight, which is perfectly sensible, until it comes to the afternoon of the tennis tournament. Bingo is nuts about tennis and becomes so immersed in the games he loses all track of Thomas. When rain stops play and everyone troops inside, they realise the VIP Filmer is missing.

Jeeves informs Bertie that Filmer took a rowing boat across the large lake to the island in the middle to explore, but the dastardly Thomas rowed after him and untied his boat, which drifted off, leaving the politician marooned.

Rather heroically, Bertie and Jeeves rush down to the lake, take another boat and row out to the island. Here Bertie discovers the hapless politician is being terrorised by a wild swan and so has taken refuge on the roof of the mock Greek temple. Bertie is just sizing up the situation when the swan goes for him, too, so he also scrambles up onto the temple roof.

They call to Jeeves who saves the day, throwing Bertie’s raincoat over the swan and using a boathook to hoist him into the undergrowth, at which point Bertie and Filmer scramble down and everyone legs it back to the boats.

Later on, as Bertie is having a bath and recovering, Jeeves surprises him by telling him that he (Jeeves) has just told Aunt Agatha that it was Bertie who unmoored the minister’s boat. At first sight Jeeves seems to have dropped Bertie in the soup. But Jeeves goes on to explain that he overheard Aunt Agatha planning to get Bertie a job as Filmer’s secretary, something he would have hated. Therefore, what at first sight appears a floater by Jeeves turns out to be a stroke of genius.

This is what I meant when I referred, above, to the way the stories so often have a second comic climax, or Plan B, a kind of encore to the main action.

Anyway, Jeeves suggests Bertie avoids recriminations from his aunt by getting dressed, shimmying down the drainpipe and Jeeves will be waiting in the car to spirit him away.

2. The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy (1926)

Bertie helps his old chum overcome his shyness about proposing to his girlfriend and standing up to his old headmaster.

The story opens with one of those arguments over taste which I mentioned above. usually Bertie and Jeeves fall out over clothes, but this is over a vase which Bertie loves and Jeeves hates.

Having established the bookend theme, Bertie goes to visit his old friend Sippy, who we first met as a freelance writer but who is now the editor of a journal, which he is finding dashed hard work. Bertie arrives for a visit and observes him being bullied by a horrible older man, who forces an unsuitable article on him and, when he’s left, turns out to be his old headmaster, Mr Waterbury. In the same visit Sippy explains that he is in love with the poet Gwendolen Moon.

Back home Bertie runs all this past Jeeves and expounds his theory that Sippy is suffering from an inferiority complex. Bertie comes up with a wizard wheeze which is to place a bag of flour over the entrance to Sippy’s offices so that next time the bullying headmaster visits, he will be doused in flour and Sippy, upon seeing him so humiliated, will lose his fear of him – and this will give him the confidence he needs to finally propose to his lady love, Miss Moon.

At present this head master bloke, this Waterbury, is trampling all over Mr Sipperley because he is hedged about with dignity, if you understand what I mean. Years have passed; Mr Sipperley now shaves daily and is in an important editorial position; but he can never forget that this bird once gave him six of the juiciest. Result: an inferiority complex. The only way to remove that complex, Jeeves, is to arrange that Mr Sipperley shall see this Waterbury in a thoroughly undignified position.

Jeeves doesn’t like the plan. He thinks they should do things in the opposite order – help Sippy pluck up the courage to propose to Gwendolen so that her acceptance gives him the boost and confidence to outface horrible old Waterbury.

But Bertie pushes on with his flour plan, popping round to the offices and perching the flour bomb on a partly ajar door when no-one is around. Then he goes for a walk round the block to let Waterbury get caught in the trap. But when he returns an hour or so later, there is no sign of a floured Waterbury but there is a Sippy wreathed in smiles because Jeeves has arranged everything.

Jeeves explains that he invited Sippy round to Bertie’s flat and, when his back was turned, whacked him with a golf club, then phoned Miss Moon and told her Sippy had had a bad accident. She immediately came rushing round and swooned at the sight of her beloved injured, tended him and he finally proposed and she joyfully said yes. Success!

How did he explain away the whacking? Well, he gave the excuse that Bertie’s vase fell on is head. This had the added virtue, for Jeeves, of smashing said vase.

All is well but Bertie realises he’s forgotten his hat so nips back into the offices, goes through the wrong door and triggers the pound-and-a-half of flour falling on his head.

So Jeeves fixes everything, gets rid of the detested vase, and Bertie gets roundly humiliated into the bargain.

Inferiority complex

‘The whole trouble being, Jeeves, that he has got one of those things that fellows do get⁠—it’s on the tip of my tongue.’
‘An inferiority complex, sir?’
‘Exactly. An inferiority complex. I have one myself with regard to my Aunt Agatha. You know me, Jeeves. You know that if it were a question of volunteers to man the lifeboat, I would spring to the task. If anyone said, ‘Don’t go down the coal-mine, daddy,’ it would have not the slightest effect on my resolution⁠—’
‘Undoubtedly, sir.’
‘And yet⁠—and this is where I want you to follow me very closely, Jeeves⁠—when I hear that my Aunt Agatha is out with her hatchet and moving in my direction, I run like a rabbit. Why? Because she gives me an inferiority complex.’

3. Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit (December 1927)

The hot water bottle fiasco.

Christmas is approaching and Lady Wickham invites Berties to her place, Skeldings, for the festive season. This disappoints Jeeves who thought they were going to Monte Carlo.

Aunt Agatha phones to warn him that his nemesis, the loony-doctor Sir Roderick Glossop, will be there too. Bertie confides in Jeeves that the reason he’s come is to get revenge on one Tuppy Glossop, the chap who humiliated him at the club by making him swing from hoops above the swimming pool for a bet, but tied the last one to the wall so Bertie was obliged to drop into the pool and swim back to the side.

Now Bobbie suggests a scheme for revenge involving a long stick, a darning needle, and a hot water bottle. Bertie tells Jeeves to get a long stick and tie a darning needle to the end of it. Then, as per Bobbie’s plan, he sneaks into Tuppy’s room in the dead of night, infiltrates the stick under the covers of the sleeping figure, locates the hot water bottle, and gently punctures it.

However, it’s at that moment that the bedroom door, which Bertie had carefully left ajar, is caught by a gust of wind and slams shut, waking the inhabitant of the bed like a shot. Bertie turns and runs but his dressing gown gets caught in the door and he is apprehended by the room’s inhabitant who… turns out to be Sir Roderick!! He and Tuppy have swapped rooms because Roderick doesn’t like sleeping on upper floors.

Sir Roderick drags Bertie back into the room where they both observe his hot water bottle leaking all over the bed, at which point Sir Roderick says he will sleep in Bertie’s bed and leaves our hero to decide not to try the now soaking wet bed, but instead fall asleep in the armchair… where, come the morning, he is awoken by Jeeves with a reviving cup of tea.

There then follows one of those comic double takes or double endings which I’ve mentioned, the kind where Jeeves first appals Bertie, before going on to give the deeper, reassuring, explanation.

In this case, Bertie is astounded to learn that it was Jeeves who betrayed him: Sir Roderick told Jeeves he was changing rooms but Jeeves didn’t pass on the message thus guaranteeing Bertie’s humiliation. BUT next second, Jeeves goes on to clarify that he did it to avoid Bertie falling into the clutches of Roderick’s daughter, Honoria Glossop. He had overheard Sir Roderick musing that Bertie might still make her a good wife.

Bertie makes the objection that Sir Roderick might, over time, come to realise the hot water bottle thing was just youthful hi-jinks, when Jeeves points out there was a second incident in the night, namely that someone crept into Bertie’s old bedroom, where Sir Roderick was sleeping, and punctured his hot water bottle using the stick and needle technique.

Dim Bertie thinks this is an extraordinary coincidence, two chaps having the same bright idea on the same night. Not really, Jeeves explains. For he overheard Bobbie Wickham giving Tuppy the idea, same as she gave Bertie the idea. In other words, she arranged for them both to sneak into each others’ rooms and puncture each others’ hot water bottles!

Bertie had been showing signs of softening to Bobbie. Now Jeeves’s revelation of her treachery makes him see her in a whole new light. Meanwhile Jeeves has seen Sir Roderick this morning who is gunning for Bertie. Jeeves thinks the best course of action would be to shin down the drainpipe and do a runner from the house to the nearest village where he can hire a car to take him back to London. Jeeves will pack up his stuff and bring it back in their motor car.

And, in order to escape Aunt Agatha’s wrath maybe get out of England altogether. Probably to Monte Carlo which is where Jeeves wanted to head all along.

‘I would not take the liberty of dictating your movements, sir, but as you already have accommodation engaged on the Blue Train for Monte Carlo for the day after to-morrow ‘
‘But you cancelled the booking?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I thought you had.’
‘No, sir.’
‘I told you to.’
‘Yes, sir. It was remiss of me, but the matter slipped my mind.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘All right, Jeeves. Monte Carlo ho, then.’
‘Very good, sir.’

A textbook example of how Jeeves always gets his way in the end.

4. Jeeves and the Song of Songs (September 1929)

Jeeves ends Tuppy Glossop’s inappropriate engagement to opera singer Cora Bellinger.

Bertie is in the bath when Tuppy Glossop calls round to announce he’s madly in love with an opera singer named Cora Bellinger. Tuppy’s called round for two reasons. 1) To invite Bertie to have lunch with him and Cora; 2) to ask him not to mention the practical joke where he bet Bertie he couldn’t swing from bars above a swimming pool which resulted in Bertie falling into said pool.

Bertie is reluctant as he is still mulling over some fierce revenge he can take for the swimming pool incident but instead finds himself hosting lunch for his enemy. When Cora arrives, Bertie is winningly rude about her:

I can’t say I exactly saw eye to eye with young Tuppy in his admiration for the Bellinger female. Delivered on the mat at one-twenty-five, she proved to be an upstanding light-heavyweight of some thirty summers, with a commanding eye and a square chin which I, personally, would have steered clear of. She seemed to me a good deal like what Cleopatra would have been after going in too freely for the starches and cereals.

Cora performs a few songs.

The Bellinger, at Tuppy’s request, had sung us a few songs before digging in at the trough, and nobody could have denied that her pipes were in great shape. Plaster was still falling from the ceiling.

After lunch Cora has to leave. Only then can Tuppy relax, have a drink and explain that, in her presence, he’s having to put on a serious and earnest facade. For example he’s given up drinking booze (in her presence).

He also explains what turns out to be the comic core of the story: that he’s planning to demonstrate what a serious type of chap he is by inviting her along to an East End Boys club run by a mutual pal of his and Bertie’s (‘Beefy Bingham who was at Oxford with us’) to show off his social conscience. More, Tuppy will impress her with his musical talent by singing ‘Sonny Boy’. (This is the 1928 song which had been a massive hit for Al Jolson the year before the story was published.)

Jeeves announces that Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia is on her way round and Tuppy disappears. She is a large impressive lady.

Aunt Dahlia is one of those big, hearty women. She used to go in a lot for hunting, and she generally speaks as if she had just sighted a fox on a hillside half a mile away. ‘Bertie,’ she cried, in the manner of one encouraging a platoon of hounds to renewed efforts,

Everything is always very tightly plotted in a Wodehouse story, and Tuppy’s disappearance is directly linked to Aunt Dahlia. Turns out she has a daughter, Angela, who Tuppy left for Cora, which explains why he is in her bad books and why he ran off so quickly. Aunt Dahlia wants Tuppy to get back together with Angela and orders Bertie to get his man Jeeves on the case. She’ll call back tomorrow to find out their plan.

So Jeeves comes up with a cunning plan. He proposes that Bertie does a turn at this East End boys club and sings ‘Sonny Boy’ before Tuppy goes on, so that by the time Tuppy sings it, the audience will have heard it and it will make no impression. And then, if Tuppy goes down badly with the audience, Jeeves argues, Cora will cease to like him:

‘I think, therefore, that, should Miss Bellinger be a witness of Mr Glossop appearing to disadvantage in public, she would cease to entertain affection for him. In the event, for instance, of his failing to please the audience on Tuesday with his singing.’

Bertie is none too pleased at having to sing ‘Sonny Boy’ in public but he reluctantly agrees to go ahead if it means saving his old mucker Tuppy from an inappropriate liaison.

At the club Bertie points out that if Tuppy hears him sing ‘Sonny Boy’, he obviously won’t sing it himself. Jeeves reassures Bertie that Tuppy, on Jeeves’ advice, has gone for a drink to settle his nerves and won’t be back until it’s time to perform. He then suggests a similar stiffener for Bertie, who accordingly nips round to the local pub and has a couple of whisky and sodas, becoming a little inebriated.

Back at the venue, Bertie manages to get through the song, giving what he thinks is a good performance though puzzled at the audience’s lack of appreciation, at which Jeeves drops the bombshell that the previous two turns before Bertie had also sung ‘Sonny Boy’! No wonder the audience was restive.

Which explains why, when Tuppy takes the stage, ignorant of all his predecessors, he is only half way through the song when the audience revolts, first making boos and catcalls, and then starting to throw things, starting with a squishy banana, so Tuppy eventually gives up and beats a retreat.

It is now that the story follows the general shape of having the First Setback followed by the Ultimate Triumph. The setback is that it’s only after Tuppy runs offstage that we learn that Cora is running late and didn’t hear Tuppy sing – the whole ordeal has been for nothing. Disheartened, Bertie says he’s off to the club for a drink, while Jeeves says he’ll stay and watch the rest.

But then comes the Ultimate Triumph: later that night, back at his flat, Bertie is visited by Tuppy who is sporting an impressive black eye and announcing that he doesn’t think Cora is the girl for him, and perhaps someone with a sweeter temperament would be more suitable such as Bertie’s cousin Angela. He leaves and Jeeves arrives, to explain all.

It was Cora who gave Tuppy his black eye. This is because, when she arrived late and finally went on and performed, Jeeves asked her to sing ‘Sonny Boy’ as a favour to Tuppy. She was upset to be received with boos and raspberries, but furious to learn that several performers before her had sung the same song and drew the conclusion that she was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. Which is when she punched Tuppy in the eye. Which is why he’s rather gone off her.

As usual, complete triumph for Jeeves.

5. Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh (October 1929)

Bobbie Wickham gives Aunt Agatha’s dog to the American impresario Blumenfeld and Bertie has to get him back.

Bertie is looking after his Aunt Agatha’s West Highland terrier, McIntosh for five weeks. Aunt A returns and expects her dog back. In the meantime Roberta ‘Bobbie’ Wickham asks Bertie to give her lunch and specifically requests pudding, ice cream and chocolates. When she turns up she explains this is because a boy, a child, is coming to lunch. She goes on to explain that 1) her mother has dramatised one of her own novels 2) she (Bobbie) is in bad odour with her mother because she smashed up the car and a few other things and so 3) when she met an American theatrical impresario she thought she’d effect a reconciliation with her mother by 4) promoting the play to him; specifically, she has asked the impresario along to Bertie’s flat for a reading of the play. So she’s invited him along, and his son.

As she tells all this Bertie realises he knows the man: it’s Blumenfeld who he and we encountered in an earlier story, set in New York, ‘Jeeves and the Chump Cyril’ (1918). Bertie violently objected to Blumenfeld’s horrible son and now vows to avoid the lunch altogether. He bounds for his coat and legs it to the stairs. Unfortunately the taxi the Blumenfeld father and so is just pulling up and they spot him but he waves a cheery hello and legs it to his club.

Many hours later he returns to his flat, having phoned ahead to check the Americans have left. Jeeves reports that Miss Wickham was well pleased with the reading and, when he phones her, she confirms this, confirms that the boy was well stuffed with ice cream, his Dad liked the play, they’ve gone off to catch a movie and she’s to report to their suite at the Savoy at 5.30 to sign the contract.

Just one catch. During the lunch the little boy took a fancy to Aunt Agatha’s dog and so, er, she gave him (the dog) to him (the boy). Bertie reels at his end of the phone. He’s had a message that Aunt Agatha is arriving home from her trip abroad today. She’ll eviscerate him when she discovers her precious dog has been given away to an American brat.

Jeeves suggests a plan: if Miss Wickham has been invited to the Americans’ suite, if she arrives early and is let in, then she can open the door moments later to Bertie who can swipe the dog, and all before the Yanks get there from their movie. A quick call to Bobbie confirms this is the arrangement. Jeeves has one more suggestion: it is that Bertie douses his trouser bottoms in aniseed on the principle that dogs go mad for it. Slightly disbelieving, Bertie legs it to a chemist’s shop, buys and bottle, and whistles back, douses his trouser bottoms as instructed, then catches a cab to the Savoy.

Everything works like a dream: Bobbie opens the Americans’ room door to Bertie, the dog smells the aniseed and comes bounding out, snuffling his trousers, following him as he legs it downstairs, out into the street and into a cab home.

Barely is he home before Jeeves announces that Blumenfeld has rung up in a rage about Bertie kidnapping his goddam’ dog. There’s no time to leg it so Bertie hides behind the sofa as Blumenfeld storms in and rants and rages at an impassive Jeeves. Jeeves plays a blinder by persuading Blumenfeld that Bertie is eccentric, even dangerous – he is particularly triggered by fat men, such as Blumenfeld. That’s why he excused himself from the lunch and they saw him running off; he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to control himself.

Bertie hears all the vigour going out of Blumenfeld’s voice as he becomes hesitant and then scared. When Jeeves offers to wake Bertie who, he says, is taking his usual nap behind the sofa, Blumenfeld blinks and then says, No, just get him out of this madhouse alive! and Jeeves sees him off the premises.

But this isn’t all. There’s always the second comic climax. For Jeeves tells a startled Bertie that, before he left, Jeeves gave Blumenfeld the dog! But wasn’t that the whole point of the whole beastly exercise, to keep the wretched dog?!

Oh no, not that dog Jeeves explains. The one he bought in Bond Street earlier that afternoon and looks exactly like McIntosh. This way Blumenfeld’s boy gets a dog, Bobbie Wickham gets her mother’s play performed, and Aunt Agatha can be reunited with her precious mutt in just a few hours’ time.

Jeeves is a genius! Everyone is, as Bertie puts it, ‘on velvet’.

6. Jeeves and the Spot of Art (December 1929)

Over dinner, Bertie tells Aunt Dahlia that he will not, now, be able to take up her kind offer of accompanying her on a yachting cruise of the Mediterranean because he has fallen in love with Gwladys Pendlebury. She is an artist and has painted his portrait which he just this morning hung in his flat. Jeeves (of course) doesn’t like it. Anyway, Bertie daren’t leave her alone in London because he has a love rival, one Lucius Pim.

But Bertie gets home from this lunch to discover that Gwladys called round but left rather distressed because she had a car accident outside the apartment block, specifically she hit a pedestrian and fractured his tibia; more specifically still, it was none other than the dreaded rival, Lucius Pim.

And to his horror, Bertie discovers that the doctor they called advised that Pim be accommodated in Bertie’s flat, in his spare room, and be accorded full rest and recovery. Also: his sister (Mrs Slingsby) is arriving in London and she must on no account discover that it was Gwladys who ran him over. Bertie must agree with the cover story that he was hit by an unknown driver who drove on.

Knowing that the sister is going to pay a visit the following day, Bertie decides to make himself scarce and motors down to Brighton for the day. However, on his return he is horrified to learn that not only did Gwladys visit for four hours – suggesting she is doing that womanly thing of caring for a poor invalid – but Mrs Slingsby was made furious with Bertie when Lucius told her that it was Bertie who ran him over – and that he was a bit drunk at the time!!

Pim is offensively calm about it, agrees it is a cheek, admits his sister is furious with him (Bertie). Not only this, her husband is an American businessman who might be so angry about it, there’s a risk he might take Bertie to court. So Pim suggests Bertie sends her a nice big bouquet of roses and a card with apologies.

Bertie does this but next thing is that the husband appears, demands his way into the flat, and starts accusing Bertie – not of running over his wife’s brother, but of having an affair with his wife! He thinks the swags of roses Bertie sent her indicated romantic tendencies. At that moment Mrs Slingsby arrives at the flat and her appearance triggers Slingsby to charge out of his chair as if to assault Bertie except that…. he slips on the golf ball Bertie had been toying with before he arrived, flies in the air and lands painfully on his back.

This gives Bertie the opportunity of legging it out the room, grabbing his coat and hat, just time to tell Jeeves to meet him at Victoria with some packed bags because he’s going to nip over to Paris till the coast clear, leaving last instructions to Jeeves to do whatever it takes to calm Slingsby down.

Weeks later Bertie ventures to return and, arriving in London, discovers that it is plastered with his image on enormous posters for Slingsby’s Super Soups. Slingsby has only gone and done a commercial deal with Gwladys to use Bertie’s image from the portrait of him she did.

Jeeves explains that he did as instructed and set about mollifying Slingsby by suggesting he use the image from the portrait. Gwladys secured a good deal, brokered by Pim acting not only as her agent but in his new-found role as her fiancé.

Well 1) that puts Bertie right off Gwladys and 2) right off the portrait (which Jeeves always disliked) and 3) in order to escape London and the ridicule the use of his image exposes him to, Jeeves suggests no better resort than to accept Aunt Dahlia’s kind invitation to the yacht cruise. As he, Jeeves, had wanted all along. Game, set and match to Jeeves.

7. Jeeves and the Kid Clementina (January 1930)

Bertie tries a cunning way of returning an AWOL schoolgirl to her school.

Bertie travels to Bingley-on-Sea to take part in the annual golf tournament. One day he confesses he’s nervous because Bingley is where a friend of his dreaded Aunt Agatha – Miss Mapleton – runs a school for girls, St Monica’s.

The clothes complication: Jeeves doesn’t like the vivid plus-fours Bertie has chosen to play golf in. What are plus-fours?

Plus-fours on Google Images

One day Bertie’s knocked out of the competition early and has met Jeeves on the promenade when they both spot his ex-girlfriend Bobbie Wickham approaching. At the start of the story, Bertie had horrified Jeeves by announcing Bobbie had invited him to go and stay with a party of Bobbie’s in Antibes in the south of France.

Now she bounces up and announces that she’s down from London to visit her friend Clementina who’s at school nearby and to take her for dinner on her birthday. More precisely, to ask Bertie to take them both out for dinner. Bobbie will then jump into her own motor and tootle back to London, leaving Bertie to deliver Clem back to her school…

When they pitch up for dinner, Clementina turns out to be a well-behaved 13-year-old. All goes well till Bobbie jumps into her car and is about to shoot off when she casually reveals that Clementina didn’t have permission to leave school. She had been sent to her room early for putting sherbet in the inkwells.

Obviously Bertie can’t just roll up and hand her in at the front door as she will get into trouble and he will be the subject of a vitriolic letter to Aunt Agatha. So Bobbie outlines a cunning plan: get some string, break into the grounds, go to the greenhouse, gather some pots, attach string to pots, climb the nearby tree; when coast is clear pull string pulling pots down onto greenhouse with great shattering. Door opens as teachers sally out to discover what’s going on. Insert Clementina through open door, she makes her way to her room, Bertie legs it.

When he explains all this to Jeeves the latter is appalled but Bertie insists they proceed. In the event he’s only just climbed up the tree when he’s startled by the flashlamp of a policeman who tells him to climb down and explain himself. Oops.

Things are getting dicey when Jeeves magically appears and intervenes. He says he and Bertie were on a visit when they saw suspicious figures in the grounds. He, Jeeves, has knocked at the servants door and asked to see the headmistress, Miss Mapleton. (Later, he explains to Bertie that while the servant was getting her, Jeeves quietly let Clementina run in through the open back door and make her own way to her bedroom.) Then told the headmistress the fake story about alleged intruders, made Bertie out to be a hero who had gone looking for them.

Jeeves takes Bertie and the copper to meet Miss Mapleton who confirms all this is true, so the policeman is obliged, reluctantly, to acquiesce and let Bertie off. There is then the comic second climax, when they all hear the flower pot Bertie had precariously balanced, crash down into the glasshouse, as originally planned. But Miss Mapleton says this only confirms Jeeves’s story that there are intruders loose in the grounds and tells the policeman to go and do his job.

The clothes conclusion: having started the story insisting on keeping the plus-fours, Bertie ends it giving in to Jeeves. As always.

8. Jeeves and the Love That Purifies (November 1929)

Bertie gets involved in a competition between two boys as to which can be the best behaved.

It is August, the month when Jeeves gets a summer holiday and decamps off to Bognor ‘for the shrimping’.

Bertie is invited to go and stay at his Aunt Dahlia’s at Brinkley Court in Worcestershire. Here he discovers that the little terror Thomas Gregson, the son of Bertie’s Aunt Agatha, has been dumped on poor Dahlia while Agatha goes abroad. Now Dahlia has a son of her own about the same age as Thomas, Bonzo, and Bertie further discovers that another guest of his aunt’s is an old boy named Mr Anstruther, who is notoriously sensitive and given to nervous collapses. So when Anstruther realised the house contained two boisterous young boys he did a clever thing and invited them to take part in a competition as to who could be the best-behaved boy, winner getting £5! Not only this but, as Anstruther explains to Bertie, he has instituted a points system and assigns the boys points on a daily basis based on their behaviour.

But Aunt Dahlia quickly informs Bertie that this is just the start: for also staying at the house are Lord and Lady Jane Snettisham and they are gamblers and they have bet on which of the two boys will break first and behave badly. And Aunt Dahlia has joined the betting, betting her legendary cook, Anatole, against Jane Snettisham’s kitchen-maid!

Now, she tells Bertie, she suspects the Snettishams (‘the opposition’) will play dirty and place unwonted temptations in Bonzo’s way, so Bertie has to help her do the same to young Thomas. After a few failed attempts, Thomas is pulling ahead in the stakes. On one notable occasion Thomas walks 3 miles to the nearest station and 3 miles back again to fetch Bertie a copy of the Sporting Times. When he hears about this Anstruther gives Thomas bonus points.

So Aunt Dahlia insists Bertie contacts Jeeves and asks him to cut short his holiday in order to come and help. Jeeves suggests they invite young Sebastian Moon, young brother of Gwendolen Moon, to stay. He has such lovely blonde curls that any self-respecting thug like Thomas will find it impossible not to beat him up. But at first all goes badly; Thomas goes out of his way to be friendly to Sebastian and very conspicuously gives him a piggy-back when Sebastian has a painful nail in his shoe.

Then Jeeves makes the crucial breakthrough: he engages Thomas in casual conversation and discovers that the boy is besotted with the movie star Greta Garbo and, like many an idealistic adolescent, he wants to make himself worthy for her by doing good deeds. Leading Bertie to make the age-old lament:

‘The motion-pictures, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘are the curse of the age.’

This is the key which brings the story to a sudden climax because all Jeeves now has to do is tell irritating young Sebastian to insult Greta Garbo to Thomas’s face. A few hours later the boys are playing down in the stables when Jeeves and Bertie both hear a piercing scream. Round the corner comes Sebastian running, pursued by Thomas carrying a big stables bucket of water. The ‘insult Greta Garbo’ strategy has obviously worked a treat.

Anstruther had been dozing in a deckchair till the scream woke him up. He leaped to his feet just as Sebastian drew near him so that the boy dodged behind him and Thomas, egged on by the momentum of his run, let loose his big bucket of water which, of course, completely misses Sebastian but drenches old Anstruther.

Anstruther seizes a nearby stick and lashes out at Thomas who turns and flees, pursued by angry old man – Victory!

Greta Garbo in her last silent movie, The Kiss (1929)

9. Jeeves and the Old School Chum (February 1930)

Bingo Little’s marriage is imperilled when a friend of his wife’s, Laura Pyke, visits and enforces a health and vegetarian regime.

Bertie’s friend Bingo Little inherits a nice country house in Norfolk, about 30 miles from Norwich. Here Bertie has a jolly stay before being dragged off to Harrogate to accompany his Uncle George on one of his many rest cures.

After a week or so he manages to slip away but discovers the atmosphere at the Littles’ place much changed. Because Bertie’s old school friend, Laura Pyke, has come to stay and she is a health food fanatic. She immediately starts criticising everything Bingo eats, insisting they switch to pretty much vegetarian meals, and strongly disapproves of lunch.

Bertie goes so far as to imagine that it’s affecting the Little marriage, as the wife, Rosie, sees her husband being mocked on a daily basis. Bingo begs him to get Jeeves to help somehow. In the end the solution is this: they all go to the nearby Lakenham races in two cars – Bingo and Rosie in one, Bertie, Jeeves and Laura in the other. Beforehand Bingo had stood over the cook to make sure he packs a small feast of tasty sandwiches in the hamper.

However when they arrive at the races, disaster has struck: someone forgot to pack the bally hamper! Laura is jubilant, saying that no-one needs a big lunch anyway and Rosie, as she has taken to doing, agrees with everything Laura says.

Luckily Bertie had instructed Jeeves to pack a few more sandwiches for himself and the three men make excuses about seeing bookies in order to sneak off behind a hedge and share out Jeeves’s sandwiches. It is here that Jeeves drops the bombshell that it was he who omitted packing the hamper. So many of the stories follow this shape – Jeeves does something which appears inexplicably awful to Bertie, until he explains its deeper significance. Now Jeeves explains that his aim was to force the ladies to go hungry and put their money where their mouth is. Bertie is sceptical because, as he explain to Jeeves, the modern woman is happy enough to skip lunch but adamant about having tea and buttered toast.

The races end and, as Bingo wants to stay on a little, Rosie asks Bertie to drive her and Laura home. Just as they’ve got to the complete back of beyond the car stutters and rolls to a halt. There’s some comic business as the two women (Rosie and Laura) send Bertie to an isolated house they see half a mile away to get some petrol but when he bangs on the door it is opened by an infuriated man who has only just managed to get his baby off to sleep, and who refuses to give petrol.

After some more business they see a light approaching along the now dark road and Bertie runs toward it to flag it down and discovers it is Bingo and Jeeves. Bingo jumps out, tells Jeeves to wait five minutes, and walks up the road with Bertie. This is so they can secretly listen to Rosie and Pyke who, lacking their afternoon tea, have begun to bicker and argue. Their argument grows in intensity till Laura insults Rosie’s latest book!

After five minutes Jeeves drives up and Laura, furious with Rosie, demands that Jeeves drives her home.

Rosie is thrilled that Bingo has arrived to rescue her but a little cross with him for not filling the car up. Bingo insists he did and says the real fault is some car mechanic stuff (which he’s clearly made up on the spot in order to blind her with manly car know-how:

‘What’s wrong is probably that the sprockets aren’t running true with the differential gear. It happens that way sometimes. I’ll fix it in a second.’

Meanwhile he also assuages her longing for ‘tea’ by taking Rosie to the nearby house – despite Bertie’s warnings that the inhabitant is a beast – and intimidating the man into giving Rosie tea, impressing Rosie, restoring her faith in her husband which is the point of the entire exercise.

She turned for an instant to Bingo, and there was a look in her eyes that one of those damsels in distress might have given the knight as he shot his cuffs and turned away from the dead dragon. It was a look of adoration, of almost reverent respect. Just the sort of look, in fact, that a husband likes to see.

While she is inside, Bertie and Bingo refuel the car with the petrol tin they brought with them so they can retrieve Rosie after she’s refreshed by tea and all toddle home. It had been Jeeves’s idea to almost empty the tank, ensuring the ladies broke down in the middle of nowhere confident that, having had no lunch and now being deprived of tea, they would have a big fight. And then arranged for Bingo to turn up like a knight in shining armour and play the hero to his wife. Well done, Jeeves!

‘He’s a marvel.’
‘A wonder.’
‘A wizard.’
‘A stout fellow,’

10. Indian Summer of an Uncle (March 1930)

Aunt Agatha tasks Bertie with breaking up the relationship between his Uncle George and a young waitress.

Fat Uncle George, whose full title is Lord Yaxley, falls in love with a waitress named Miss Rhoda Platt and is threatening to marry her. Jeeves knows all about it, of course, and that the girl is a waitress who lives in East Dulwich. Aunt Agatha storms in and orders Bertie to go to East Dulwich straightaway and offer the girl £100 to cancel the engagement. Bertie drives down to the girl’s place, Wistaria Lodge, and encounters her stout, imposing aunt, who tells him Rhoda is in bed with the flu. There’s some comic business when she at first takes Bertie to be a doctor and asks him to examine his knee. Once that’s sorted out, Bertie loses his nerve and can’t bring himself to raise the subject with the aunt or offer her the money.

He returns to his flat where Aunt Agatha is waiting and she is furious at his failure. At this point he calls in Jeeves who, of course, fixes things. Jeeves suggests they invite Uncle George for lunch to meet the girl’s stout aunt: once he sees her and learns that she will move in if he marries the girl, it will put him off the match. Aunt Agatha ridicules this suggestion and insists that Bertie continues with the money option but, once she’s left, Bertie tells Jeeves to arrange the lunch.

When Bertie asks how Jeeves knows about Rhoda, Jeeves replies that a friend of his, another valet, named Smethurst (valet to a Colonel Mainwaring-Smith), wants to marry this Rhoda and had an ‘understanding’ with her, until she met Uncle George. Now she is torn between love for Smethurst, a man of her own station in life, and the opportunity of marrying a man with a title.

Next morning Bertie awakes with a sense of impending doom. At lunchtime Rhoda’s aunt, Mrs Wilberforce, arrives. In casual chat she stuns Bertie by telling him how she used to work as a barmaid at the Criterion. Now the thing is, as backstory earlier on, Bertie had told Jeeves (and the reader) that Uncle George had done this kind of thing – falling for a member of the lower classes – once before, years ago – with a barmaid at the Criterion, and had only just been talked out of it by the family. Could this be the self-same barmaid? Well, this is a comic story so the answer is, of course, Yes!

Panic-stricken, Bertie tells Jeeves to call Uncle George and cancel lunch but it’s too late because he arrives at just that moment, enters the drawing room and is astonished and delighted to encounter his beloved of all those years ago, immediately using their old pet names:

‘Piggy?’
‘Maudie!’

Bertie doesn’t hang around to see any more but legs it off to his club, the Drones Club. Here he gets a call from Aunt Agatha who, to his surprise, sounds happy. She explains this is because Uncle George has told her he’s called off the plan to marry Miss Rhoda and instead is going to marry a Mrs Wilberforce, a woman closer to his own age. The comic point is that Aunt Agatha mistakenly believes Mrs Wilberforce belongs to an aristocratic family.

‘I wonder which Wilberforces that would be. There are two main branches of the family — the
Essex Wilberforces and the Cumberland Wilberforces. I believe there is also a cadet branch somewhere in Shropshire.’

Bertie dare not point out her mistake, returns to his flat and confronts Jeeves. Surely this is a disaster! But Jeeves smoothly puts him right. He explains that 1) Smethurst asked him to break up Rhoda and Uncle George and that 2) Mrs Wilberforce might actually be a good match for Uncle George: he keeps going off the rails because he is an unsupervised bachelor. Even during lunch she was commenting on his overweight and recommending a healthier regime. She might be a blessing in disguise.

As to Aunt Agatha who will, no doubt, be furious, maybe a little trip abroad?

11. The Ordeal of Young Tuppy (April 1930)

Every year aristocratic households live in fear of who Bertie will go and stay with for Christmas. This year it’s Sir Reginald Witherspoon, Bart, of Bleaching Court, Upper Bleaching, Hampshire. A consideration is that Tuppy Glossop will be there and Bertie is still brooding his revenge after the swimming pool humiliation.

But plans are interrupted by the arrival of Aunt Agatha with news that Tuppy appears to be reneging on his engagement to Angela, Aunt Dahlia’s daughter, in favour of some ‘dog girl’ he’s met at this place Bleaching Court. Dahlia tells Bertie to tell Jeeves to sort it out.

So Bertie and Wooster motor down there, coming across Tuppy mooning over the girl en route. Once arrived and unpacking, Tuppy bounces in to explain the meaning of the telegram he sent Bertie. In it he asks him to bring 1) his football boots and 2) an Irish water-spaniel spaniel. The dog was designed to impress the girl and her parents (Bertie didn’t bring one). The football boots (which Bertie did bring) are to enable Tuppy to take part in the annual village football match between Upper Bleaching and Hockley-cum-Meston.

Jeeves tells Bertie that this football match is no mere sporting event but a primitive affair of great violence between two villages who hate each other. Bertie visits both villages and is horrified at the bloodthirsty language being bandied about. But when he warns Tuppy, the latter rejects it all, saying this is his big opportunity to impress the lovely Miss Dalgleish.

Wodehouse describes the match, which is in fact a form of barbarian rugby, with brilliant comic verve. Before the match Bertie had concocted a scheme whereby Jeeves would send a telegram purporting to come from Aunt Dahlia and telling Tuppy to return to London because Angela is ill and calling for him – but when he goes to deliver it to Tuppy, he realises he’s left it in the pocket of his other coat!00 It doesn’t matter, though, because, with a kind of comic inevitability, once his blood is up, Tuppy turns out to be a ferocious player, takes revenge on a red-haired player who’s been persecuting him and even scores a try!

Bertie gets back to his room at Bleaching Court and confides to Jeeves that he thinks the case is lost: he failed to deliver the telegram and Tuppy was the star of the game. However, at that moment Tuppy enters, still covered in mud, but a broken man. He explains that the lovely Miss Dalgleish wasn’t there and so didn’t see his heroic play! Apparently someone rang her from London claiming to have an Irish water-spaniel they wanted to sell her so she scorned the chance of seeing Tuppy risk his life for her and motored off to the capital, only to discover it was the wrong kind of spaniel after all.

He is gutted – disappointed in Miss Dalgliesh, what kind of life partner would she make! – and disillusioned with women as a sex.

Bertie mentions Angela but Tuppy crossly remembers the argument about her hat they had which led to them breaking up. it is now, at the perfect psychological moment, that Bertie retrieves the telegram he and Jeeves faked and hands it to Tuppy. When he reads that Angela in her delirium is calling his name, Tuppy melts, tells Bertie what a wonderful woman she is, asks to borrow his car so he can motor off to her bedside hot foot. And so he exits.

Just as Jeeves re-enters with the drink he ordered. By this stage even dim Bertie realises that it must have been Jeeves who made the mystery phone call to Miss Dalgliesh inviting her to London to see the phantom Irish water-spaniel, and Jeeves admits as much. But what will happen when Tuppy arrives in London and finds Angela very much not ill in bed and feverishly calling Tuppy’s name? Jeeves has phoned Aunt Dahlia and told her to manage the situation.

And thus concludes the eleventh and final short story in the collection.

Cast

Bertie Wooster
Jeeves
Aunt Agatha aka Mrs Gregson – ‘on the occasions when my Aunt Agatha is perturbed strong men dive down drain-pipes to get out of her way’ – rudely referred to as ‘the Family Curse’
Spenser Gregson – Aunt Agatha’s (first) husband, big on the Stock Exchange, ‘recently cleaned up to an amazing extent in Sumatra Rubber’
Cousin Thomas – Agatha’s mischievous son
- Purvis – their butler
Mr A.B. Filmer – cabinet minister, president of the Anti-Tobacco League, in Bertie’s view a ‘superfatted bore’, character in ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’
Bingo Little – old pal of Bertie’s from school, always getting into trouble
Rosie M. Banks – married to Bingo, celebrated authoress of romantic tripe
Oliver ‘Sippy’ Sipperly – old pal of Bertie’s, currently ‘editor of a weekly paper devoted to the interests of the lighter Society’
Waterbury – Sippy’s old headmaster – ‘a large, important-looking bird with penetrating eyes, a Roman nose, and high cheekbones. Authoritative’
Miss Gwendolen Moon – authoress of ‘Autumn Leaves,’ ‘ ’Twas on an English June,’ and other works, beloved of Sippy
Sir Roderick Glossop – nerve specialist aka the ‘loony doctor’
Tuppy Glossop – nephew of Sr Roderick, who played the wicked trick on Bertie at a swimming pool, who he conspired to humiliate by bursting his hot water bottle in ‘Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit’ but who he helps dump an unsuitable opera singer girlfriend, Cora Bellingham, in ‘Jeeves and the Song of Songs’
Cora Bellingham – large opera singer who dumps Tuppy
Miss Roberta ‘Bobbie’ Wickham – red-haired girl who Bertie fancies until she is revealed as a prankster in ‘Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit’
Blumenfeld – the American theatrical impresario in ‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’ – ‘A large, round, fat, overflowing bird, who might quite easily, if stirred, fall on a fellow and flatten him to the carpet’
Blumenfeld fils – brattish son
Gwladys Pendlebury – artist who Bertie thinks he’s in love with in ‘Jeeves and the Spot of Art’
Lucius Pim – artist and rival for the affections of Gwladys Pendlebury
Mrs Slingsby – Pim’s sister, who blames Bertie for running Lucius over
Mr Slingsby – her husband, a pushy American who threatens to assault Bertie
Miss Mapleton – Aunt Agatha’s friend who runs a girls’ school in Bingley
Clementina – Bobbie’s 13-year-old cousin who attends St. Monica’s school for girls
Lady Wickham
Anstruther – an old friend of Aunt Dahlia’s late father, prone to nervous collapses
Lord ‘Jack’ Snettisham
Lady Jane Snettisham
Bonzo Travers – son of Aunt Dahlia
Mrs Wilberforce – the waitress Rhoda’s aunt, who turns out to be the waitress Uncle George fell in love with a generation earlier, in ‘Indian Summer of an Uncle’

Bertie’s character

As Aunt Agatha puts it, addressing Bertie:

‘Mr Filmer is a serious-minded man of high character and purpose, and you are just the type of vapid and frivolous wastrel against which he is most likely to be prejudiced.’

And again:

‘I have always known that you were an imbecile, Bertie,’ said the flesh-and-blood, now down at about three degrees Fahrenheit, ‘but I did suppose that you had some proper feeling, some pride, some respect for your position.’

And:

‘Bertie,’ said Aunt Dahlia, with a sort of frozen calm, ‘You are the Abysmal Chump… It’s simply because I am fond of you and have influence with the Lunacy Commissioners that you weren’t put in a padded cell years ago…’

As Bertie himself puts it.

Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that in his journey through life he is impeded and generally snootered by about as scaly a collection of aunts as was ever assembled.

I explained as much to the fair cargo and received in return a ‘Tchah!’ from the Pyke that nearly lifted the top of my head off. What with having a covey of female relations who have regarded me from childhood as about ten degrees short of a half-wit, I have become rather a connoisseur of ‘Tchahs,’ and the Pyke’s seemed to me well up in Class A, possessing much of the timbre and brio of my Aunt Agatha’s.

And:

Every year, starting about the middle of November, there is a good deal of anxiety and apprehension among owners of the better-class of country-house throughout England as to who will get Bertram Wooster’s patronage for the Christmas holidays. It may be one or it may be another. As my Aunt Dahlia says, you never know where the blow will fall.

All compared with Jeeves’s omniscience:

‘There are very few things in this world, Aunt Agatha,’ I said gravely, ‘that Jeeves doesn’t know all about.’

Slang

The last time I had seen old Sippy, you must remember, he had had all the appearance of a man who didn’t know it was loaded.

He looked as if he had been taking as much as will cover a sixpence every morning before breakfast for years.

The fixture was scratched owing to events occurring which convinced the old boy that I was off my napper.

It seemed to me that things were beginning to look pretty scaly.

He [Jeeves] has a nasty way of conveying the impression that he looks on Bertram Wooster as a sort of idiot child who, but for him, would conk in the first chukka.

How any doom or disaster could lurk behind the simple pronging of a spot of dinner together, I failed to see.

‘Take it from me, Aunt Agatha, I’ve studied human nature and I don’t believe there’s a female in the world who could sec Uncle George fairly often in those waistcoats he wears without feeling that it was due to her better self to give him the gate.’

An unseen hand without tootled on the bell, and I braced myself to play the host. The binge was on.

I slid away. The last I saw of them, Uncle George was down beside her on the Chesterfield, buzzing hard.

It was — what’s the word I want? — it was plausible, of course, but still I shook the onion.

‘Bertie,’ said Aunt Dahlia — and I could see her generous nature was stirred to its depths — ‘one more crack like that out of you, and I shall forget that I am an aunt and hand you one.’
I became soothing. I gave her the old oil.

‘We must put a bit of a jerk in it and save young Tuppy in spite of himself.’

I thought ‘tuning out’ was a modern idiom, maybe dating from the 1960s. Apparently not. In ‘Indian Summer of an Uncle’, Jeeves embarks on a long explanation and Bertie comments:

I saw that this was going to take some time. I tuned out.

Bertie’s cheerful philistinism

As Shakespeare says, if you’re going to do a thing you might just as well pop right at it and get it over.

‘You want time to think, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Take it, Jeeves, take it. You may feel brainier after a night’s sleep. What is it Shakespeare calls sleep, Jeeves?’
‘Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, sir.’
‘Exactly. Well, there you are, then.’

‘Remember what the poet Shakespeare said, Jeeves.’
‘What was that, sir?’
‘”Exit hurriedly, pursued by a bear.” You’ll find it in one of his plays. I remember drawing a picture of it on the side of the page, when I was at school.’

‘Yes, sir. Smethurst — his name is Smethurst — would consider it a consummation devoutly to be
wished.’
‘Rather well put, that, Jeeves. Your own?’
‘No, sir. The Swan of Avon, sir.’

Actually, reading them in chronological order, it feels like there are more and more literary references in the stories, played for laughs of course, but increasingly evident. For example ‘Indian Summer of an Uncle’ contains several references to Shakespeare, and to Robert Burns and Tennyson, and others are liberally scattered about:

JEEVES: ‘An invalid undoubtedly exercises a powerful appeal to the motherliness which exists in every woman’s heart, sir. Invalids seem to stir their deepest feelings. The poet Scott has put the matter neatly in the lines — ‘Oh, Woman in our hours of case uncertain, coy, and hard to please… When pain and anguish rack the brow.’
I held up a hand.
‘At some other time, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘I shall be delighted to hear you your piece, but just now I am
not in the mood.’

Memorable moments

‘Are wives often like that? Welcoming criticism of the lord and master, I mean?’
‘They are generally open to suggestions from the outside public with regard to the improvement of their husbands, sir.’
‘That is why married men are wan, what?’
‘Yes, sir.’

I heard Aunt Agatha rumble like a volcano just before it starts to set about the neighbours, but I did not wilt.

The stupid narrator

Literary critics and writers themselves have long known about the so-called ‘unreliable narrator’, who tells the story but you slowly realise is giving you a biased account. There’s a moment in ‘Indian Summer of an Uncle’ when Bertie is being more than usually obtuse, when the reader has realised the family he’s visiting has mistaken him for a doctor but it takes Bertie five minutes longer than the reader to realise this, while all the time he describes himself as being sharp and alert and quick to spot things.. A bit belatedly (like Bertie himself) I realised that, in Bertie Wooster, we are dealing with the stupid narrator, a narrator whose dimness has been laid on for our comic amusement.

And at the same moment I realised there’s a family resemblance with Captain Hastings whose obtuseness is exaggerated in order to promote the suave cleverness of Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s detective novels.

(There’s actually a real world connection here, because the lovely character actor, Jonathan Cecil, played Captain Hastings to Peter Ustinov’s Hercule Poirot in three Agatha Christie TV adaptations in the 1980s, and he also recorded audiobooks of a number of the Jeeves books. According to Wikipedia ‘He might have been more strongly identified with narration of the series than any other actor.’ He was eminently qualified to do so, having himself attended Eton and New College Oxford.)

P.G. Wodehouse and Sherlock Holmes

It’s amazing how large the shadow of Sherlock Holmes loomed, for generations after his invention. I’ve pointed out in my Agatha Christie reviews that almost every single one of her detective novels features at least one reference to the master detective; and that the relationship between dim Captain Hastings and super-smart Hercule Poirot echoes or is built on the template of slow Dr Watson and the omniscient Holmes. Well, same here. I’m hardly the first to point out that the relationship between incredibly dim Bertie Wooster and super-smart Jeeves is based on the same basic structure.

Wodehouse nowhere mentions Holmes by name but this thought was triggered by the way each of these stories is actually very like one of Holmes’s cases, with a knotty problem set out at the beginning, Bertie following a number of false leads, only for Jeeves to dazzlingly solve it in the end.

And this notion of ‘cases’ is made explicit in ‘The Ordeal of Young Tuppy’:

‘You remember the trouble we had when he ran after that singing-woman.’
I recollected the case. You will find it elsewhere in the archives.

This use of ‘case’, and also the reference to ‘the archives’, are very reminiscent of the way Dr Watson refers to his files of Holmes cases.

Alas, the times

BERTIE: ‘Twice during dinner tonight the Pyke said things about young Bingo’s intestinal canal which I shouldn’t have thought would have been possible in mixed company even in this lax post-War era.’

BERTIE: ‘You tell me that Sebastian Moon, a stripling of such tender years that he can go about the place with long curls without causing mob violence, is in love with Clara Bow?”
JEEVES: ‘And has been for some little time, he gave me to understand, sir.’
BERTIE: ‘Jeeves, this Younger Generation is hot stuff.’
JEEVES: ‘Yes, sir.’

BERTIE: ‘What do you think about it yourself?’
RHODA’S AUNT: ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter what I think. There’s no doing anything with girls these days, is there?’
BERTIE: ‘Not much.’
RHODA’S AUNT: ‘What I often say is, I wonder what girls are coming to. Still, there it is.’
BERTIE: ‘Absolutely.’

And mocking contemporary fiction. There are a surprising number of writers in the Jeeves stories, although somehow disguised by the poshboy banter. Bingo Little has married an author of ladies romances such as Mervyn Keene, Clubman, and Only A Factory Girl, leading Bertie to ponder:

I shouldn’t wonder if right from the start Mrs. Bingo hasn’t had a sort of sneaking regret that Bingo isn’t one of those strong, curt, Empire-building kind of Englishmen she puts into her books, with sad, unfathomable eyes, lean, sensitive hands, and riding-boots. You see what I mean?’
‘Precisely, sir.’

Freud

If you’ve read my Agatha Christie reviews, you’ll know I’m interested in the spread of references to Freud or Freudian ideas in popular fiction of the 1920s. There are several references scattered among the Jeeves short stories, not least because one of the recurring characters, Sir Roderick Glossop, is a nerve specialist or psychiatrist. Here’s another one, from ‘Jeeves and the Old School Chum’ published in 1930, made humorous by the stock contrast between Jeeves’s intellectual fluency and Bertie’s dimness.

‘Precisely, sir. You imply that Miss Pyke’s criticisms will have been instrumental in moving the
hitherto unformulated dissatisfaction from the subconscious to the conscious mind.’
‘Once again, Jeeves?’ I said, trying to grab it as it came off the bat, but missing it by several yards.
He repeated the dose.
‘Well, I daresay you’re right,’ I said.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

P.S. Plans

I won’t draw a plan, because my experience is that, when you’re reading one of those detective stories and come to the bit where the author draws a plan of the Manor, showing room where body was found, stairs leading to passageway, and all the rest of it, one just skips. I’ll simply explain in a few brief words.

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by Simon on December 1, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Short stories

Tagged A.B. Filmer, Agatha Christie, Al Jolson, Anstruther, Antibes, Aunt Agatha, Aunt Dahlia, Beefy Bingham, Bertie Wooster, Bertram Wooster, Bingley, Bingley-on-Sea, Bingo Little, Bleaching Court, Blumenfeld, Bobbie Wickham, Bognor, Bonzo, Bonzo Travers, Brinkley Court, Captain Hastings, Clementina, Cleopatra, Colonel Mainwaring-Smith, comedy, Cora Bellinger, Cora Bellingham, Cousin Thomas, depth psychology, East Dulwich, East End, Episode of the Dog McIntosh, farce, Freud, Greta Garbo, Gwendolen Moon, Gwladys Pendlebury, Hampshire, Harrogate, Hercule Poirot, Hertfordshire, Hockley-cum-Meston, Honoria Glossop, hot water bottle, humour, Indian Summer of an Uncle, inferiority complex, Jeeves, Jeeves and the Chump Cyril, Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh, Jeeves and the Impending Doom, Jeeves and the Kid Clementina, Jeeves and the Love That Purifies, Jeeves and the Old School Chum, Jeeves and the Song of Songs, Jeeves and the Spot of Art, Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit, Jeeves short stories, Jonathan Cecil, Lady Jane Snettisham, Lady Wickham, Lakenham, Laura Pyke, London, Lord Jack Snettisham, Lord Snettisham, Lord Yaxley, Lucius Pim, McIntosh, Miss Dalgleish, Miss Gwendolen Moon, Miss Mapleton, Miss Moon, mock heroic, Monte Carlo, Mr Anstruther, Mr Bickersteth, Mr Sipperley, Mr Slingsby, Mr Waterbury, Mrs Gregson, Mrs Slingsby, Mrs Wilberforce, Norfolk, Norwich, Oliver 'Sippy' Sipperly, on velvet, Oxford University, P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse society, Paris, plus-fours, Psychology, Purvis, Rhoda Platt, Roberta 'Bobbie' Wickham, Roberta Wickham, Rosie Little, Rosie M. Banks, Sebastian Moon, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, short stories, Sir Reginald Witherspoon, Sir Roderick Glossop, Skeldings, slang, Slingsby's Super Soups, Smethurst, Sonny Boy, Spenser Gregson, St Monica's, Sumatra Rubber, the Blue Train, The Criterion, the Drones, the Drones Club, the Family Curse, The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy, The Kiss, The Love That Purifies, The Ordeal of Young Tuppy, the Sporting Times, The Spot of Art, Thomas Gregson, Tuppy Glossop, Uncle George, Upper Bleaching, upper class slang, vegetarian, Very Good Jeeves, Waterbury, West Highland terrier, Wistaria Lodge, Woollam Chersey, Worcestershire

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/01/very-good-jeeves-p-g-wodehouse/

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1925)

You can’t call a chap the world’s greatest authority on the yellow-billed cuckoo without rousing a certain disposition towards chumminess in him.

Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining-room and materialized on the rug. Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can’t do that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.

‘It was a maxim of one of my former employers, sir—as I believe I mentioned to you once before—the present Lord Bridgworth, that there is always a way.’

‘I fear, sir,’ sighed Jeeves, ‘that when it comes to a matter of cooks, ladies have but a rudimentary sense of morality.’

‘I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir,’ said Jeeves.

This is the third collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse, ten stories in all, four of them repeated from the first proto-collection, ‘My Man, Jeeves’, rewritten and polished.

They include the ‘origin story’ of how Bertie first met Jeeves. This happened ‘about half a dozen years ago’ i.e. before the Great War. Bertie fired his previous valet, Meadowes, for pinching things and Jeeves came recommended from an agency. At the time Bertie was engaged to the unnecessarily brainy Florence Craye and Jeeves proves his worth by helping him get out of the engagement.

The thing, you see, is that Jeeves is so dashed competent. You can spot it even in the way he shoves studs into a shirt. I rely on him absolutely in every crisis, and he never lets me down. And, what’s more, he can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon.

It’s mildly surprising that so many of the stories are set in New York, something the narrator addresses directly in the first NY story (second in this set).

The stories

Jeeves Takes Charge
The Artistic Career of Corky (New York)
Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (New York)
Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (New York)
The Aunt and the Sluggard (New York)
The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy (Paris)
Without the Option
Fixing it for Freddie
Clustering Round Young Bingo
Bertie Changes His Mind

1. Jeeves Takes Charge (1916)

London: Bertie hires Jeeves for the first time. Jeeves immediately demonstrates his worth by serving up a drink which cures hangovers. Bertie is engaged to Lady Florence Craye who asks him to return to Easeby, his Uncle Willoughby’s country house, to help her. Bertie had advised her to get into his uncle’s good books by offering to read the old boy’s memoirs, ‘Recollections of a Long Life’. She is appalled because they reveal a life of dissipation and also feature Florence’s own father, Lord Worplesdon, in a bad light, so Florence says that if he really loves her, Bertie will get rid of the manuscript.

So after it’s been left in the hall for a servant to take to the post Bertie nicks it and locks it in a chest of drawers in his room. But when the manuscript fails to turn up at his publishers, Uncle Willoughby smells a rat, and Bertie is betrayed by Florence’s kid brother, an over-officious youth named Edwin.

But when Uncle Willoughby insists on searching Bertie’s room, and opens the fatal drawer, the manuscript is not there. Of course Jeeves has whisked it away. In fact he has sent it to the publishers, arguing that it actually contains very mild and harmless stuff. When she hears that Bertie has failed her, Lady Florence promptly dumps him but Jeeves assures Bertie she was not a good match for him anyway.

Thus is established Jeeves’s almost supernatural ability to solve all problems, anticipate all complications, and do the best thing for his master.

2. The Artistic Career of Corky (1916)

New York: As early as the second story, we are in New York. Bertie explains why:

You will notice, as you flit through these reminiscences of mine, that from time to time the scene of action is laid in and around the city of New York; and it is just possible that this may occasion the puzzled look and the start of surprise. ‘What,’ it is possible that you may ask yourselves, ‘is Bertram doing so far from his beloved native land?’

Well, it’s a fairly longish story; but, reefing it down a bit and turning it for the nonce into a two-reeler, what happened was that my Aunt Agatha on one occasion sent me over to America to try to stop young Gussie, my cousin, marrying a girl on the vaudeville stage, and I got the whole thing so mixed up that I decided it would be a sound scheme to stop on in New York for a bit instead of going back and having long, cosy chats with her about the affair.

So I sent Jeeves out to find a decent flat, and settled down for a spell of exile.

In this story Bertie gets Jeeves to help an American pal of his, Bruce ‘Corky’ Corcoran, an American artist who is failing to become a portrait painter and so living off an allowance from his rich uncle, Alexander Worple, who made his pile in jute.

Now Uncle Alexander is also a keen ornithologist so when Corky confides that he’s worried he (the uncle) won’t approve of his (Corky’s) new girlfriend (Muriel Singer), Jeeves comes up with the scheme of getting the girlfriend to write a children’s book of American birds full of praise for Uncle Alex’s works, wangle an invitation to dinner, and there pretend to meet Corky for the first time.

How could the old boy fail to a) approve of her b) bless the engagement of his nephew and such a wonderfully bird-literate young lady?

In the event, things don’t go according to plan because the uncle is so taken with the young lady (who turns out to be an unprincipled gold-digger) that he falls in love, proposes and marries her.

There is then a funny sequel when, months later, Bertie pops round to Corky’s studio and finds him carrying out his first ever portrait commission, to paint the newborn baby who is the offspring of Uncle Alexander and Muriel. Unfortunately he can’t keep his resentment out of the picture which ends up making the baby look like a drunken abortion.

Bertie is witness to the Uncle arriving to see the painting, blowing a gasket and storming out vowing to cut off Corky’s allowance forever. It’s at this point that Jeeves saves the day by suggesting that the baby is reimagined as a comic character and sent off to the newspapers who are always clamouring for new comic characters which can form the basis of long-running series in the Funny Papers. Jeeves suggests a suitably facile title for the series, ‘The Adventures of Baby Blobbs’.

3. Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1916)

New York: Bertie is visited by Lady Malvern, a friend of Aunt Agatha and very earnest investigator of social conditions. She introduces him to her useless feeble son, Wilmot, Lord Pershore aka Motty, who sits there feebly sucking his cane then drops the bombshell that she wants him (Bertie) to look after him (Motty) while she tours American prisons for a book she is writing. She reassures Bertie that Motty is a vegetarian, teetotaller, and quiet reader.

The joke is that as soon as Lady Malvern has departed, Motty turns into a party animal, insisting on going to nightclubs, staying out till all hours, getting hog-whimpering drunk and enacting all kinds of perilous pranks.

I’m a quiet, peaceful sort of bloke who has lived all his life in London, and I can’t stand the pace these swift sportsmen from the rural districts set. What I mean to say is, I’m all for rational enjoyment and so forth, but I think a chappie makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan. And decent mirth and all that sort of thing are all right, but I do bar dancing on tables and having to dash all over the place dodging waiters, managers, and chuckers-out, just when you want to sit still and digest.

Motty reels back at all hours dead drunk, brings back to the apartment an aggressive bull-terrier he won in a raffle, and generally makes Bertie’s life so much of a misery that he moves out. But when he pops back a few days later, Jeeves tells him Motty assaulted a policeman and has been sentenced to 30 days in prison.

Lady Malvern reappears and Jeeves suggests they tell her Motty has gone to Boston for a few days. She listens to Bertie explaining all this then reveals that she was recently visiting Blackwell’s Island prison and saw Motty there, ‘dressed in a striped suit, seated beside a pile of stones with a hammer in his hands’.

Oops. That’s torn it! Lady Malvern launches into a diatribe against Bertie for corrupting her sweet innocent son but then Jeeves comes to the rescue with a new story. He explains that Bertie was merely repeating the cover story that he (Jeeves) and Motty gave him because, in reality, Motty is in prison doing undercover research to help his beloved mother with her book.

Lady Malvern hesitates for a moment and then buys it, apologises to Bertie, and all is well.

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘you are certainly a life-saver.’

4. Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg (1917)

New York: A friend of Bertie’s, Mr Francis Bickersteth aka Bicky, exists on a stipend from his uncle, His Grace the Duke of Chiswick, a stingy old man, what the Americans call ‘a hard-boiled egg’, hence the title. Bicky justifies his allowance by telling him whopping lies about how he’s forging a career in business. When the Duke announces he’s going to make a visit Bicky comes to Bertie for help.

Jeeves suggests that they pretend that Bertie’s apartment is really Bicky’s and Jeeves is Bicky’s valet, in order to impress his uncle and this they do. Trouble is it works too well and so the uncle announces he can obviously afford to cancel Bicky’s allowance now he is so successful, plunging the young man into despair.

Bicky has a comic obsession with starting a chicken farm (he keeps going on about how they breed like rabbits and how profitable eggs are) but Jeeves comes up with a rather more practical suggestion. Noting how keen Americans are to meet celebrities, he suggests they invite a convention of 87 gentlemen from Birdsburg, Missouri to shake the hand of a genu-INE British Duke for the very reasonable fee of $150.

Unfortunately the plan comes unstuck when the first batch of Birdsburgers give the scam away, the Duke is outraged, and throws them out. Once again things have reached their lowest point when Jeeves intervenes with a comment. He simply points out how much the American press would pay for this whole story if Bicky went to them with it – at which point the Duke hurriedly offers Bicky a secretarial job back in London. he tries to get away with it being unpaid but Bicky holds out for £500 a year and wins!

5. The Aunt and the Sluggard (1916)

New York: Bertie has a friend, Rockmetteller ‘Rocky’ Todd, a gentle souls who lives quietly in the country. One morning Bertie is rudely awakened by Rocky announcing he has a problem. (By this stage we are getting used to the shape of all these stories, the way his pals come to Bertie with problems which Jeeves, rather than he, manages to solve.)

Rocky’s problem is that his aunt in Illinois, Miss Isabel Rockmetteller, has told him she will give him a generous allowance on one condition: that he lives in New York and writes her weekly accounts of the wild time he is having there. Weak and retiring herself, she wants to enjoy the life of a big city partygoer at second hand.

Trouble is Rocky really is the shy and retiring type who hates the city and loves the simple life in the country where he can spend all day watching worms.

He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to for hours at a stretch.

Brought in for his advice, Jeeves suggests that he himself attends nightclubs and parties and writes exciting letters to the aunt and so it is agreed and so all goes well for some weeks, with Aunt Isabel loving the letters from her nephew who is obviously at the centre of New York’s giddy social whirl!

However, disaster strikes when Aunt Isabel unexpectedly arrives in New York and shows up at Bertie’s apartment which she has been led to believe belongs to Rocky. So Rocky, Bertie and Jeeves have to pretend it really is Rocky’s flat and Bertie moves to a hotel leaving Jeeves behind.

But obviously Rocky struggles badly to show his aunt the wild times he claimed to be having since he, in fact, knows no-one and never goes out. He calls in Bertie to help take her out for the evening but the aunt is clearly starting to suspect something…

Except that, in the comic conclusion of the story, it turns out that what is on her mind is not that she has been hoodwinked by her nephew but the fact that she recently went to an old-time revivalist meeting, led by the famous Jimmy Mundy, and has seen the light. She has realised that New York is a sink of corruption and iniquity.

‘He said that the tango and the fox-trot were devices of the devil to drag people down into the Bottomless Pit. He said that there was more sin in ten minutes with a negro banjo orchestra than in all the ancient revels of Nineveh and Babylon. And when he stood on one leg and pointed right at where I was sitting and shouted “This means you!” I could have sunk through the floor. I came away a changed woman.’

When she casually mentions that Ricky’s man Jeeves took her to the revivalist meeting by mistake we immediately realise it was no mistake, but another brilliant Jeeves wheeze for resolving a tricky situation.

Now she begs her nephew to forsake live in the City of Sin and adopt the simple life in some rural retreat. Which is what, of course, he wanted all along. Problem solved.

I was stunned by the man’s resource.
‘It’s brain,’ I said; ‘pure brain! What do you do to get like that, Jeeves? I believe you must eat a lot of fish, or something. Do you eat a lot of fish, Jeeves?’
‘No, sir.’

6. The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy (1924)

Paris: Suddenly we are in Paris. Bertie’s pal, Charles ‘Biffy’ Biffen is even more useless than most of his pals and can barely remember his own name. He calls on Bertie to moan that he fell in love with a model named Mabel on an ocean liner going to New York, proposed to her and she accepted but then they got separated at Customs and he forgot her surname and the hotel where she was staying and so lost contact.

Now he’s in Paris telling Bertie that he intends to sell the country house he inherited. Bertie shivers when Biffy tells him the best potential customer is Sir Roderick Glossop, the nerve specialist, because he (Bertie) had a narrow escape after accidentally getting engaged to Glossop’s imperious daughter, Honoria Glossop.

In the event Bertie is not surprised to read in The Times ten days later the announcement of Biffy’s engagement to marry Honoria. She’s snaffled him!

London Back in London Bertie is visited by Biffy who asks how Bertie got out of his engagement to Honoria. Bertie comes up with a plan. Knowing how fussy Sir Roderick is, Bertie suggests Biffy invites him for dinner, then offers a bouquet of flowers for him to smell which will include one of those toy flowers which squirt water in the face of the hapless victim. Sir Roderick will be so horrified at this asinine prank that he’ll cancel the marriage immediately.

Bertie is present at the fateful lunch and deeply disappointed when, at the last moment, Biffy chickens out and doesn’t press the squirter button. Instead he, Bertie and Sir Roderick decide to go and visit the current British Empire Exhibition (this was held from 23 April to 1 November 1924 and from 9 May to 31 October 1925.)

Bored with the exhibition Bertie and Biffy sneak off for a drink until Biffy spots a building called the Palace of Beauty and remembers that Jeeves suggested he go there. The place displays women dressed as famous characters from history and Biffy is astounded to see the girl he proposed to on the liner is one of the performers. The performers are behind glass which Biffy promptly smashes with his cane, to the great amusement of the visiting crowds and which swiftly attracts the police.

When Sir Roderick shows up, Bertie explains that Biffy has had a fit which achieves the desired effect i.e. Glossop forbids the marriage between Biffy and Honoria. The police hold Biffy in the cells overnight but next day he is released and reunited with his lady love.

All through this adventure, Jeeves had been surprisingly standoffish and reluctant to help. Now Bertie discovers this is because Jeeves was under the mistaken impression that Biffy had abandoned Mabel. When Bertie told him the facts, Jeeves realized his mistake and decided to help by directing Biffy to the exhibition display where he would see her and they could be reunited.

Bertie is grateful for all this and asks Jeeves how he knew Mabel in the first place. Jeeves surprises Bertie by replying that she is Jeeves’s niece, causing Bertie to almost crash the car.

7. Without the Option (1925)

On the evening of the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, Bertie goes on the razzle with his pal Oliver ‘Sippy’ Sipperley. Sippy is depressed because a) he is dependent for his lifestyle on an allowance from his Aunt Vera, Miss Sipperly, ‘an imperious and quick-tempered old lady; and b) through a series of lies he’s ended up committed to going and spending three weeks with some tedious friends of hers, the Pringles.

Bertie has a drunken inspiration and tells Sippy what he needs is a policeman’s helmet so they assault the nearest policeman and steal his helmet. The story opens the next morning after they’ve been arrested and spent the night in the cells. In court Bertie gets away with paying a £5 fine but Sippy – the one who carried out the actual assault, and who gave the authorities the ludicrous name Leon Trotzky to try and conceal his identity – is sentenced to thirty days in prison ‘without the option’ of paying a fine, hence the story’s title.

So Bertie goes home and tells Jeeves the situation: Aunt Vera had invited Sippy to go and sing in her village concert. Desperate to get out of it, Sippy invented a cock-and-bull story about having been commissioned to write a series of articles about Cambridge and so having to go there for 3 weeks. At which point Aunt Vera wrote back to say he really must stay with her friends, Professor and Mrs Pringle, and telling him she’d written to ask them if he (Sippy) could stay with him.

When Bertie (still suffering from a hangover) asks Jeeves for suggestions, Jeeves comes up with the obvious one: that Bertie impersonates Sippy and stays with the Pringles masquerading as his friend. Bertie protests but Jeeves informs him that the fearsome Aunt Agatha has been ringing up, wanting to know more about his involvement in some fracas with the police and this news panics Bertie into agreeing, telling Jeeves to pack his stuff, and catching the first train to Cambridge.

So he travels down to Cambridge, introduces himself to the Pringles as Sippy and they believe him. Things go alright to begin with but, as you can imagine, slowly the comic complications accumulate. The Pringles uniformly dislike him.

Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs Pringle’s aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it.

To Bertie’s horror, their daughter resembles Honoria Glossop, another female with whom he’s had some close shaves, and he isn’t surprised to learn from Jeeves that she is Honoria’s cousin.

Honoria Glossop has a voice like a lion tamer making some authoritative announcement to one of the troupe, and so had this girl.

Heloise takes to flirting with Bertie who discovers there’s a drainpipe outside his bedroom window which he uses for getting in and out so as to avoid her.

The comic climax comes when none other than Sir Roderick Glossop (‘the loony doctor’) turns up on a visit. Bertie has an unfortunate history with Glossop because, in order to get out of an engagement to his daughter (Honoria) Bertie had pretended to be barking mad. But the real point is that Sir Roderick instantly recognises Bertie and announces that he has pulled a cruel practical joke on the Pringle household.

There’s no choice but for Bertie to come completely clean, admit he is not Oliver Sipperley, confess that he came to stay with them because Oliver is in prison after biffing a police officer. Surprisingly, that evening’s dinner goes ahead, albeit in a frosty atmosphere. At the end of the evening, when Bertie asks Jeeves for advice, the latter suggests they drive hot foot to see Sippy’s aunt, although she lives 150 miles away.

It has the advantage of getting Bertie out of the Pringle household so he jumps at the chance, packs his bags, makes his excuses, and they leg it. The comic denouement of the story is that when they arrive at Miss Sipperley’s place and confess all. To their surprise Miss Sipperley is pleased.

‘You aren’t annoyed?’ I said.
‘Annoyed?’ She chuckled happily. ‘I’ve never heard such a splendid thing in my life… If every young man in England went about hitting policemen in the stomach, it would be a better country to live in.’

Bertie is relieved but puzzled until, later that night at the inn where they’re staying, Jeeves explains that Miss Sipperley has been the victim of a particularly officious police officer, who has issued her summonses for exceeding the speed limit in her car; for allowing her dog to appear in public without a collar; and for failing to abate a smoky chimney.

And then goes further to explain that the police constable is Jeeves’s nephew, Egbert, and he slipped him a fiver to encourage him to be so officious to Miss Sipperley, thus triggering her anti-police feeling.

In other words, Jeeves has anticipated everything and fixed everything well in advance. Well done, Jeeves! Bertie gladly gives Jeeves £10 for his troubles.

8. Fixing it for Freddie (1925)

Freddie Bullivant is rejected by his fiancée Elizabeth Vickers, so Bertie invites him along on his annual holiday to Marvis Bay where he has taken a cottage for July and August. Only problem is that this Elizabeth Vickers shows up.

On the beach Bertie notices this Elizabeth playing with a toddler and deduces he must be a nephew or relation. So he has a brainwave for reuniting Freddie and Elizabeth, namely that when he returns to the beach and finds Elizabeth nowhere in sight, Bertie kidnaps the little boy and rushes back to his holiday home where he presents him to a startled Freddie. His plan is that Freddie can then take the toddler back to the house where she will be eternally grateful etc.

Only snag is that when Freddie returns the obnoxious little boy to Elizabeth, he discovers that he is not at all a relative of Elizabeth’s – she was just being friendly to a complete stranger on the beach, she thinks him lunatic to bring to her a child who has nothing to do with her, and so Freddie ends up even deeper into her bad books.

But worse is to come because not only does it turn out to be more difficult than expected to track down who exactly is the rightful owner of the little pest, but when Bertie eventually finds the holiday home and parents he belongs to, it turns out that the entire house is in quarantine because there’s a bad case of the mumps. The owner, a Mr Kegworthy, discovers that he and Bertie have relations in common and this is why he asks Bertie to look after the toddler until his uncle (who Kegworthy has telegramed) can turn up and take over.

Cue the predictable problems when hapless bachelors try to look after a problem child i.e. they have no idea what to feed him, no idea how to get him undressed, bathed or put to bed etc. In the event it turns out there’s a nanny looking after children in the neighbouring holiday cottage and Bertie is able to pay her to attend morning and evening to sort the kid out.

But they still haven’t reunited Freddy and Elizabeth until Jeeves returns from the cinema and says he saw a movie where a separated couple are reunited over love of their sweet little child. So he and Bertie conceive of getting Freddie and Elizabeth together and then getting the kid to say something soppy and sentimental at the right psychological moment. They decide to go with ‘Kiss Freddie’ as it’s so short. (It’s interesting that both of them see it as a scene from a movie complete with stage and camera directions.)

But they’re still in the middle of rehearsing the kids in his lines when, a few days later, Elizabeth passes the cottage on her way to the beach, sees the kid and asks Bertie (who she thinks is the father and doesn’t realise is a friend of Freddie’s) if she can step onto the veranda to say hello and also offer him some toffee. At which point the kid starts delivering its line – ‘Kiss Freddie, kiss Freddie!’ – and at that precise moment Freddie emerges from the cottage.

There is a horrible moment when the girl is stunned and then outraged, so Bertie proceeds to tell her their preposterous plan at which… she bursts out laughing. Bertie runs to fetch Jeeves and tell him it’s been a complete disaster except that by the time they get back to the cottage, they can see Freddie and Elizabeth locked in a passionate embrace. It worked!

9. Clustering Round Young Bingo (1925)

Bertie writes an article titled ‘What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing’ for his Aunt Dahlia (aka Mrs George Travers) who runs a woman’s paper called Milady’s Boudoir.

The ‘arguing over clothes’ motif appears as Jeeves disapproves of Bertie ordering a dozen silk shirts to wear with evening dress, which Jeeves regards as infradig.

Meanwhile, the central plot contains several strands:

1) It turns out that Bingo’s wife, Rosie, has also written an article for Milady’s Boudoir, titled ‘How I Keep the Love of My Husband-Baby’, which largely consists of mocking him, so he wants Bertie’s advice on how to suppress it. To be precise, she has dictated the text into a dictaphone so it only exists as a recorded cylinder (the output from those devices) so is not yet on paper.

2) At the same time, Bingo’s wife needs a new housemaid.

3) Aunt Dahlia wants a new cook (and Bingo’s cook, Anatole, is a legend in the kitchen).

4) Aunt Dahlia’s husband i.e. Bertie’s Uncle George, is always overdoing his eating, needs to take regular visits to spas, so is heading off to Harrogate to take a rest cure and wants Bertie to accompany him, but Bertie doesn’t want to go, dreading the idea of being closeted for weeks with the old bore.

Jeeves suggests a solution: how about they persuade the legendary cook Anatole to quit Bingo’s place and go and work for Aunt Dahlia? Bingo’s wife will never forgive Aunt D for stealing her cook, and so will withdraw her humiliating article from Milady’s Boudoir. Reluctantly, Bingo agrees.

However there is a hitch. Jeeves reports back that Anatole refuses to leave because he is in love with Aunt Dahlia’s parlourmaid.

Still obsessing about his wife’s article, Bingo persuades Bertie to sneak through the window into his empty house and steal the cylinder from Rosie’s dictating machine. Unfortunately, Bertie is disturbed by the Littles’ pet Pekingese dog, knocks over a table packed with ornaments and generally makes an enormous racket. When he climbs out the window it is to be confronted by the parlourmaid who has fetched a policeman. There is a surprisingly restrained scene with the policeman who Bertie persuades to go into the house to find a photo of himself he claims is on the Littles’ sideboard and will establish that he is a friend of the family. When this can’t be found, Bertie simply runs away.

Jeeves recommends that Bertie should maybe join his Uncle George at Harrogate after all, to avoid getting tangled up in any more of Bingo’s schemes.

So Bertie spends two weeks in Harrogate where he meets Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom and is surprised to learn that Anatole has, after all, left the Littles to become her cook, even if it means Rosie Little will no longer talk to her.

Confused by this outcome, Bertie returns to London where Jeeves explains the rather complicated sequence of events. Remember that the Littles needed a new housemaid? Well Jeeves arranged for them to get a new one but for it to be a woman whose affections Anatole had once played with, getting engaged to her then disappearing. In other words, he now preferred to leave and willingly went to work for Aunt Dahlia.

For sorting everything out, Jeeves receives £20 from Bingo (for getting the humiliating article quashed – and because he happened to have won a spot on the horses), £25 from Aunt Dahlia (for getting the cook of her dreams), £10 from Rosie (for finding a satisfactory new parlourmaid), £25 from Uncle Tom (for finding the fabulous new cook) and £10 from Uncle George (for persuading Bertie to join him in Harrogate).

Bertie gives him a fiver into the bargain and then, as so often, there is the clothes punchline i.e. the silk shirts Bertie opened the story by telling us about and that Jeeves objected to? Jeeves says he has sent them back to the tailors (Peabody and Simms) and Bertie acquiesces, beaten again.

10. Bertie Changes His Mind (1922)

Jeeves abolishes Bertie’s thoughts about inviting his sister and her daughters (his nieces) to come and stay by arranging a humiliating fiasco at a girls’ school.

The internet tells me it is the only Jeeves and Wooster story to be narrated by Jeeves. The voice of the piece is, accordingly, completely different, sober and restrained instead of exuberant and slangy.

Bertie announces he is bored. He is bored of the same old Jeeves bringing the same old whiskey and soda in on the same old tray at the same old hour. He went to a play the other night which featured a lovely little girl clinging to her beloved Papa and it stirred a paternal feeling in the old bosom.

In a mad moment, Bertie wonders about adopting a child, which Jeeves jumps on, emphasising how complicated and long-drawn-out the process would be. But undeterred, when Bertie goes on to mention that his sister Mrs Scholfield and her three daughters will be arriving back from India next week, and floats the idea that they might come and stay, Jeeves is horrified. He suggests a restful break in Brighton which they embark on. But on the drive back Jeeves has arranged an elaborate wheeze.

Driving back they see a schoolgirl waving and stop to help. She introduces herself as Peggy Mainwaring and worries that she’ll get in trouble with her school’s headmistress, Miss Tomlinson, for bunking off. Jeeves suggests that they take Peggy for a drive before returning her to the school where Bertie can pretend to be a friend of the girl’s father.

This they do for a bit. When they roll up at the school, Jeeves mischievously tells Miss Tomlinson that Mr Wooster is an eminent figure and would be delighted to give a speech to the girls. Beforehand they have a smoke by the car in the school garage where 1) Bertie notices he’s mislaid his cigarette case and 2) Jeeves tells him of his experiences as a page boy in a school for young ladies where the girls stared and giggled at guests to make them uncomfortable.

So it is a nervous and discombobulated Bertie who takes to the school stage. And indeed his speech is beyond appalling as he doesn’t even know what he’s meant to be speaking about. The only moment when he finds his feet is when Miss Tomlinson (desperately) hisses at him to offer the girls some advice and the first thing that comes to Bertie’s mind is a horseracing tip before launching into what is obviously going to be a risqué story about a stockbroker and a chorus girl, at which point a furious Miss Tomlinson interrupts him.

Bertie legs it out to the garage where Jeeves calmly announces that the car is fixed and ready to go. Bertie hides under the rug in the back as they hear angry voices approaching. Remember the missing cigarette case? Jeeves arranged for Rosie to take it and hand round cigarettes to her pals in a way that made it look like Bertie was encouraging Miss Tomlinson’s girls to smoke. When she asks where Bertie is, Jeeves disclaims all knowledge. After she’s reluctantly left, Jeeves jumps in the jalopy and they make their getaway.

A week later at the flat, Bertie comments how cosy and pleasant it is just the two of them living in bachelor bliss. When Jeeves asks if Bertie has found a suitable house where he can live with his sister and three nieces. With a shudder, Bertie tells Jeeves that he has changed his mind.

Cast

Bertie Wooster
- Jeeves – his valet
Florence Craye
Lord Worplesdon – Florence’s temperamental father
Edwin – Florence’s young brother, fourteen now and had just joined the Boy Scouts – ‘a ferret-faced kid, whom I had disliked since birth’
Uncle Willoughby – Bertie’s uncle, owner of Easeby, writing a family history
- Oakshott, the butler
Aubrey Fothergill – friend of Bertie’s
- Meekyn – his valet
Bruce ‘Corky’ Corcoran- American artist in New York, failing to be a portrait painter and so living off an allowance from…
Alexander Worple – Corky’s uncle, made his pile in jute, as a hobby is an expert ornithologist of American birds
Miss Muriel Singer – Corky’s girlfriend, chorus girl – ‘in the chorus of that show Choose your Exit at the Manhattan’
Lady Malvern – friend of Aunt Agatha – ‘a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O. P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season’
Wilmot, Lord Pershore aka Motty – her son
Rollo – the bull-terrier Motty wins in a raffle
Rocky Todd – pal Bertie goes to stay with – ‘a rummy sort of a chap who lives all alone in the wilds of Long Island’
Mr Francis Bickersteth aka Bicky
the Duke of Chiswick – Bicky’s uncle
Rockmetteller ‘Rocky’ Todd – ‘Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet’
Isabel Rockmetteller – Rocky’s stern aunt
Charles Edward Biffen – ‘Old Biffy’ – ‘As vague and woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich’ I’m no master-mind myself but compared with Biffy I’m one of the great thinkers of all time
Sir Roderick Glossop – the great nerve specialist whose daughter, Honoria, Bertie was briefly engaged to
Oliver Randolph Sipperley
Professor Pringle – in Cambridge – ‘a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock’
Mrs Pringle – her ‘aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it’
Heloise Pringle – daughter – unnervingly reminiscent of Honoria Glossop
Pringle’s aged mother
Pringle’s Aunt Jane
Egbert – a police constable and cousin of Jeeves’s
Mr Freddie Bullivant – engaged to…
Miss Elizabeth Vickers
Aunt Dahlia – Dahlia Travers, wife of (Uncle) Tom Travers, editor of Milady’s Boudoir
Tom Travers – husband of Dahlia Travers and thus Bertie Wooster’s uncle, Uncle Tom – made a fortune doing business in the Far East and funds his wife’s magazine Milady’s Boudoir
Anatole – Bingo Little’s outstanding French cook
Uncle George Wooster – always overeating and having to be sent off to spas
Mrs Schofield – Bertie’s sister (her only mention in the canon)
Peggy Mainwaring – schoolgirl Jeeves and Bertie pick up in their car
Miss Tomlinson – headmistress of the girls’ school in ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’

Aspects of their characters

Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to smiling.

Bertie: I’m a quiet, peaceful sort of bloke who has lived all his life in London.

In New York Bertie stays on 57th street.

For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.

I was sitting in the apartment one afternoon, about a month after the thing had started, smoking a cigarette and resting the old bean, when the door opened and the voice of Jeeves burst the silence like a bomb. It wasn’t that he spoke loud. He has one of those soft, soothing voices that slide through the atmosphere like the note of a far-off sheep.

There was the faintest flutter of sound in the background. It was the respectful cough with which Jeeves announces that he is about to speak without having been spoken to.

Bertie: ‘I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess.’

Now, those who know me, if you ask them, will tell you that I’m a chump. My Aunt Agatha would testify to this effect. So would my Uncle Percy and many more of my nearest and—if you like to use the expression—dearest. Well, I don’t mind. I admit it. I am a chump.

Aunts and uncles

It’s a curious thing how many of my pals seem to have aunts and uncles who are their main source of supply. There is Bicky for one, with his uncle the Duke of Chiswick; Corky, who, until things went wrong, looked to Alexander Worple, the bird specialist, for sustenance. And I shall be telling you a story shortly of a dear old friend of mine, Oliver Sipperley, who had an aunt in Yorkshire. These things cannot be mere coincidence. They must be meant. What I’m driving at is that Providence seems to look after the chumps of this world; and, personally, I’m all for it. I suppose the fact is that, having been snootered from infancy upwards by my own aunts, I like to see that it is possible for these relatives to have a better and a softer side.

Sippy is by way of being an author, though mainly dependent for the necessaries of life on subsidies from an old aunt who lives in the country, and his conversation often takes a literary turn.

Bertie’s cheerful philistinism

I remember, as a kid, having to learn by heart a poem about a bird by the name of Eugene Aram, who had the deuce of a job in this respect. All I can recall of the actual poetry is the bit that goes:

Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tumty-tum,
I slew him, tum-tum tum!

‘Sam Patterson would do it for a hundred dollars. He writes a novelette, three short stories, and ten thousand words of a serial for one of the all-fiction magazines under different names every month.’

The older I get, the more I agree with Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest before the dawn and there’s a silver lining and what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts.

I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy bird—who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

The situation floored me. I’m not denying it. Hamlet must have felt much as I did when his father’s ghost bobbed up in the fairway.

Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship—Shop—Schopenhauer. That’s the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.

‘Emerson,’ I reminded him, ‘says a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature, sir.’
‘Well, you can tell Emerson from me next time you see him that he’s an ass.’
‘Very good, sir.’

‘Jeeves, have you seen that play called I-forget-its-dashed-name?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It’s on at the What-d’you-call-it. I went last night.’

Slang

I was reluctantly compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten. [fire, sack]

Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on the tabasco side as a young man. [wild]

‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said; ‘about that check suit.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Is it really a frost?’ [no go, inappropriate]

Now, a great many fellows think that having a rich uncle is a pretty soft snap.

He has got a pippin of an idea… [corker, good one]

Time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.

‘Promising Young Artist Beans Baby With Axe.’ [brains, hits on head with]

For perhaps a minute there was one of the scaliest silences I’ve ever run up against.
That was one of the scaliest affairs I was ever mixed up with…

I gave Motty the swift east-to-west.

Motty was under the surface. Completely sozzled. [drunk]

Devilish efficient sort of bird, and looked on in commercial circles as quite the nib!’ [bee’s knees, top thing]

It will show you pretty well how pipped I was when I tell you that I as near as a toucher put on a white tie with a dinner-jacket.

‘Aren’t you bucked?’ I said.
‘Bucked!’
‘If I were in your place I should be frightfully braced.

The old boy came to lunch here to give me the once-over, and Jeeves arranged matters so that he went away firmly convinced that I was off my onion.’ [mad]

Biffy’s first slosh smashed the glass all to a hash.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Poor old Biffy’s only gone off his crumpet.’ [mad]

Honoria was the daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor, and I had been engaged to her for about three weeks, much against my wishes, when the old boy most fortunately got the idea that I was off my rocker and put the bee on the proceedings. [ended]

‘The bit about soft silk shirts got in amongst him a trifle; but you can take it from me, Aunt Dahlia, that they are the latest yodel and will be much seen at first nights and other occasions where Society assembles.’

Jeeves’s mysterious modes of locomotion

I rang the bell. ‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.

I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn’t there any longer.

Jeeves shimmered out…

It was Jeeves. He had shimmered in, carrying my evening things…

Jeeves had projected himself into the background.

Jeeves flowed in…

Jeeves floated silently into the dining-room…

Jeeves had projected himself in from the dining-room and materialized on the rug.

At this juncture the door-bell rang. Jeeves floated out to answer it.

Jeeves filtered in with the tea.

In this matter of shimmering into rooms the man is rummy to a degree. You’re sitting in the old arm-chair, thinking of this and that, and then suddenly you look up, and there he is. He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly-fish.

Jeeves flowed in with the tray, like some silent stream meandering over its mossy bed.

Jeeves projected himself into the room with the tea.

It was all so home-like when he floated noiselessly into the room that I nearly broke down.

Then he streamed imperceptibly towards the door and flowed silently out.

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Jeeves. And, with not another word, he slid out.

Stunts

As you might have noticed, I’ve singled out the use of the word ‘stunt’ in other 1920s authors, specifically Agatha Christie. At that time ‘stunt’ denoted ‘anything done with the intention of improving or advertising one’s image or gaining an advantage over rivals, a gimmick or device for attracting attention.’

‘My private impression is that, without knowing it, I’ve worked that stunt that Sargent used to pull—painting the soul of the sitter.’

Comic phrases

It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.

Uncle Willoughby meandered back to the library, and there was a silence that you could have dug bits out of with a spoon.

I went to my room and rang for Jeeves. He came in looking as if nothing had happened or was ever going to happen. He was the calmest thing in captivity.

‘This is the first time I’ve been let out alone, and I mean to make the most of it. We’re only young once. Why interfere with life’s morning? Young man, rejoice in thy youth! Tra-la! What ho!’
Put like that, it did seem reasonable.

Won’t you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?’
‘No, thank you.’
She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs.

Bicky rocked like a jelly in a high wind.

He picked up his glass and drained it feverishly, overlooking the fact that it hadn’t anything in it.

The chappie writhed like an electric fan.

She looked at me in rather a rummy way. It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.

‘On the liner going to New York I met a girl.’ Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half.

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table.

I never met a man who had such a knack of making a fellow feel like a waste-product.

The whole strength of the company gazed at me like a family group out of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s less cheery yarns, and I felt my joie de vivre dying at the roots.

It was what happened in the case of Honoria Glossop. She was notoriously one of the brainiest women of her year at Girton, and she just gathered me in like a bull pup swallowing a piece of steak.’

She had had her back to me, and at the sound of my voice she executed a sort of leap or bound, not unlike a barefoot dancer who steps on a tin-tack half-way through the Vision of Salome.

The policeman was regarding me in a boiled way.

Comic critiques of privilege

The stories overflow with entertaining critiques of Bertie’s character, often from his own mouth – but some of them have the extra pointedness of making him stand for an entire decadent class of faineant slackers.

‘Aunt Isabel doesn’t like you. She asked me what you did for a living. And when I told her you didn’t do anything she said she thought as much, and that you were a typical specimen of a useless and decaying aristocracy.’

Describing how the valet he had before Jeeves, came back from a Christian revivalist meeting:

I remember, back in England, the man I had before Jeeves sneaked off to a meeting on his evening out and came back and denounced me in front of a crowd of chappies I was giving a bit of supper to as a useless blot on the fabric of Society.

Heloise Pringle reports of Bertie that:

‘The man surely can’t be so interesting a companion as all that. Uncle Roderick says he is an invertebrate waster.’

And even the dimwit Bertie is given a comic passage where he’s dimly aware of the fantastically privileged life he leads.

As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I’d always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves, and haven’t got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don’t you know. I mean to say, ever since then I’ve been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.

Compare and contrast with the appalling privations described in the pioneering work of social documentary, Life As We Have Known It, which describes working class existence around the same time.

Life As We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1931)

Freud

If you’ve read my Agatha Christie reviews you’ll know I’m noting the spread of references to Freud in popular fiction of the 1920s. Here’s one from ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’ published in 1924.

The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud.

Mind you the point about Honoria, the girl in question, is that her father is a nerve specialist aka psychiatrist, so it’s a pertinent reference. But also an interesting indication of how Freud’s name had percolated through to popular culture.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

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by Simon on November 28, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Short stories

Tagged Agatha Christie, Alexander Worple, Anatole, Aubrey Fothergill, Aunt Agatha, Aunt Dahlia, Aunt Jane, Bertie Changes His Mind, Bertie Wooster, Bicky, Biffy, Bingo Little, Birdsburg, British Empire Exhibition, Bruce 'Corky' Corcoran, Charles 'Biffy' Biffen, Charles Edward Biffen, Clustering Round Young Bingo, comic stories, Dahlia Travers, Dictaphone, Duke of Chiswick, Easeby, Edgar Allan Poe, Edwin, Egbert, Elizabeth Vickers, Emerson, Eugene Aram, Fixing it for Freddie, Florence Craye, Francis Bickersteth, Freddie Bullivant, Freud, Great War, Gussie, Hamlet, Harrogate, Heloise, Heloise Pringle, Honoria Glossop, humour, infradig, Isabel Rockmetteller, Jeeves, Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, Jeeves and Wooster, Jeeves Takes Charge, Jimmy Mundy, Lady Malvern, Leon Trotzky, Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women, Long Island, Lord Bridgworth, Lord Pershore, Lord Worplesdon, Mabel, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Marvis Bay, Meadowes, Meekyn, Milady's Boudoir, Miss Isabel Rockmetteller, Miss Muriel Singer, Miss Sipperly, Miss Tomlinson, Missouri, Motty, Mr Francis Bickersteth, Mr Kegworthy, Mrs George Travers, Mrs Pringle, Mrs Schofield, Muriel Singer, My Man Jeeves, negro, New York, Oakshott, ocean liner, Old Biffy, Oliver 'Sippy' Sipperley, Oliver Randolph Sipperley, Oliver Sipperley, ornithology, Oxford Cambridge Boat Race, P.G. Wodehouse, Peabody and Simms, Peggy Mainwaring, philistinism, Professor Pringle, Recollections of a Long Life, Rockmetteller Todd, Rocky Todd, Rollo, Sam Patterson, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, short stories, Sippy, Sir Roderick Glossop, The Adventures of Baby Blobbs, The Artistic Career of Corky, The Aunt and the Sluggard, the Pringles, The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy, Tom Travers, two-reeler, Uncle George Wooster, Uncle Willoughby, Vision of Salome, Wilmot, Without the Option

Posted by Simon on November 28, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/28/carry-on-jeeves-pg-wodehouse/

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1923)

‘This looks like being another of your successes. I’ve always said, and I always shall say, that for sheer brain, Jeeves, you stand alone. All the other great thinkers of the age are simply in the crowd, watching you go by.’
‘Thank you very much, sir. I endeavour to give satisfaction.’

‘Bertie,’ said Bingo reproachfully, ‘I saved your life once.’
‘When?’
‘Didn’t I? It must have been some other fellow, then.’

I bit the bullet and had a dash at being airy.
‘Oh, well, tra-la-la!’ I said.
‘Precisely, sir,’ said Jeeves.

‘This is a rotten country,’ said Cyril.
‘Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!’ I said.

‘Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!’ I said. ‘What?’ There didn’t seem much else to say.

‘The Inimitable Jeeves’ by P.G. Wodehouse, published in 1923, was the first of the Jeeves novels. It wasn’t originally conceived as a single narrative and was cobbled together from 11 previously published short stories featuring the same characters.

All the stories had previously appeared in The Strand magazine in the UK, between December 1921 and November 1922, except for one, ‘Jeeves and the Chump Cyril’, which had appeared in the Strand in August 1918.

This was the second collection of Jeeves stories, after ‘My Man Jeeves’ (1919) although the four Jeeves stories in that collection would be reprinted in the next one, ‘Carry On, Jeeves’, in 1925.

Bingo’s infatuations

The stories are connected and feature either Bertie Wooster’s friend Richard ‘Bingo’ Little, who is always falling in love (with no fewer than seven young ladies in this volume):

Bingo Little is a chap I was at school with, and we see a lot of each other still. He’s the nephew of old Mortimer Little, who retired from business recently with a goodish pile. (You’ve probably heard of Little’s Liniment—It Limbers Up the Legs.)
I don’t know why, ever since I first knew him at school, I should have felt a rummy feeling of responsibility for young Bingo. I mean to say, he’s not my son (thank goodness) or my brother or anything like that. He’s got absolutely no claim on me at all, and yet a large-sized chunk of my existence seems to be spent in fussing over him like a bally old hen and hauling him out of the soup.
‘I suppose what it amounts to, Jeeves, is that, when young Bingo really takes his coat off and starts in, there is no power of God or man that can prevent him making a chump of himself.’

Bertie dodges matrimony

Or Bertie himself as he tries to dodge romantic liaisons organised by his fearful Aunt Agatha.

Jeeves

In most of the stories Jeeves smoothly saves both Bertie and Bingo, proving himself an invaluable and almost supernaturally clever valet.

Arguments over clothes

Bertie is a fussy dresser, almost a dandy:

As a rule, I’m what you might call a slow and careful dresser: I like to linger over the tie and see that the trousers are just so;

Jeeves lays out his outfit for him every morning. But another thread running through the stories is that Bertie and Jeeves have disagreements, almost like lovers’ tiffs, caused when Jeeves disapproves of one of Bertie’s clothing choices, such as a bright red cummerbund or a pair of mauve socks or coloured spats, and a coldness affects their relationship.

I went straight back to my room, dug out the cummerbund, and draped it round the old tum. I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said in a sort of hushed voice. ‘You are surely not proposing to appear in public in that thing?’
‘The cummerbund?’ I said in a careless, debonair way, passing it off. ‘Oh, rather!’
‘I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘The effect, sir, is loud in the extreme.’

Hence the three or four periods of froideur in the relationship. But not for long.

Bertie is loaded

Another theme is that, despite his modesty, Bertie is the only one with any money. All the other posh young men he knows – Bingo, Eustace and Claude – are constantly touching him for small loans. Bertie himself admits he enjoys ‘a sizable private income and a topping digestion’.

Gambling

Cliché for centuries that posh young aristocrats had nothing to do except gamble. Same here, in a comic mode. Bertie and pals are shown routinely betting on horse races. hence the chapter set at the Goodwood races, and its sequel, the comic chapter when the young chaps bet on how long local vicars’ sermons will be.

If there is one thing we Woosters are simply dripping with, it is sporting blood.

New York

I’m always surprised by the number of stories in which Bertie jaunts off to New York. He goes there to escape Aunt Agatha’s wrath after he had a disastrously bad lunch with Sir Roderick Glossop, father of Honoria Glossop who Agatha wanted Bertie to marry. The story in question (A Letter of Introduction) features a priceless exchange between another Brit newly arrived in the city, Cyril Bassington-Bassington and Bertie’s long-time pal George Caffyn:

‘This is a rotten country,’ said Cyril.
‘Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know!’ I said.
‘We do our best,’ said George.
‘Old George is an American,’ I explained. ‘Writes plays, don’t you know, and what not.’
‘Of course, I didn’t invent the country,’ said George. ‘That was Columbus. But I shall be delighted to consider any improvements you may suggest and lay them before the proper authorities.’

Cast

Bertie Wooster – idle, upper-class loafer
Jeeves – his faithful valet
Bingo Little – his idiot friend, always falling in love with inappropriate types, ‘perpetually hard-up’
Mortimer Little – Bingo’s uncle, who becomes Lord Bittlesham
Miss Watson, Uncle Mortimer’s cook – with whom Jeeves, for a while, has ‘an understanding’
Aunt Agatha aka Mrs Gregson – Bertie’s arch enemy, ‘a sort of human vampire-bat’
Spenser – her butler
Mabel – the tearoom waitress Bingo thinks he’s in love with
Aline Hemmingway – confidence trickster
Soapy Sid – her accomplice posing as her brother
McGarry – barman
Honoria Glossop – young woman Aunt Agatha tries to fix Bertie up with – ‘To me the girl was simply nothing more nor less than a pot of poison. One of those dashed large, brainy, strenuous, dynamic girls you see so many of these days. She had been at Girton [College, Cambridge] where, in addition to enlarging her brain to the most frightful extent, she had gone in for every kind of sport and developed the physique of a middle-weight catch-as-catch-can wrestler’
Oswald Glossop – Honoria’s kid brother
Sir Roderick Glossop – Honoria’s father, nerve specialist, owner of Ditteredge Hall – ‘an extraordinarily formidable old bird he was. He had a pair of shaggy eyebrows which gave his eyes a piercing look which was not at all the sort of thing a fellow wanted to encounter on an empty stomach. He was fairly tall and fairly broad, and he had the most enormous head, with practically no hair on it, which made it seem bigger and much more like the dome of St. Paul’s’
Claude and Eustace – twins, kids at school with Bertie in his last summer term
Cyril Bassington-Bassington – ‘a thin, tall chappie with a lot of light hair and pale-blue goggly eyes which made him look like one of the rarer kinds of fish’
George Caffyn – acquaintance in New York – ‘a fellow who wrote plays and what not’, author of new musical comedy, ‘Ask Dad’
Blumenfield – manager of the theatre where ‘Ask Dad’ is being staged – ‘an absolutely round chappie with big spectacles and a practically hairless dome’
Charlotte Corday Rowbotham – Bingo falls for
Cynthia Wickhammersley – pal of Bertie’s – ‘I think she’s a topper, and she thinks me next door to a looney, so everything’s nice and matey’
Lord Wickhammersley
Lady Wickhammersley
- Brookfield, their butler
Rupert Steggles – chief opponent in the gambling chapters – ‘a little, rat-faced fellow, with shifty eyes and a suspicious nature’
Rev. Francis Heppenstall – author of the famously long sermon on brotherly love who, at the last minute, hands it to his nephew to deliver, thus ruining the great sermon handicap
the Reverend Mr Wingham – Mr Heppenstall’s new curate and Bingo’s rival for the love of Miss Mary Burgess
Miss Mary Burgess
Wilfred Burgess – her kid brother
Marion Wardour – friend of Bertie’s who both Eustace and Claude claim to have fallen in love with

Aspects of Wodehouse’s style

1. First-person narrative by Bertie, which consists of:

2. Direct address – treating the reader as a confidential chum:

The audience was settling down into the sort of torpor usual on these occasions, when the first of Bingo’s interpolated bits occurred. It was that number which What’s-her-name sings in that revue at the Palace—you would recognise the tune if I hummed it, but I can never get hold of the dashed thing.

A small boy with a face like a turbot edged out in front of the curtain, which had been lowered after a pretty painful scene about a wishing-ring or a fairy’s curse or something of that sort, and started to sing that song of George Thingummy’s out of ‘Cuddle Up’. You know the one I mean. ‘Always Listen to Mother, Girls!’ it’s called, and he gets the audience to join in and sing the refrain.

3. This artless candour is related to disarming honesty about his charming brainlessness.

4. It’s easy to overlook that the entire thing is a satire on the kind of posh dimwits epitomised by Bertie and his friends.

5. Much of this is embodied in the prose style of the text and, in particular, in the relentless use of upper-class slang.

An endless fount of posh slang

Two things. 1) the text is so solidly stuffed with upper-class slang, in both dialogue and the first-person narrative, that it creates its own world. 2) It is so exuberant and creative and original that the endless slang is a major contributor to the light, bubbly comic vibe. Thus:

Bingo biffs about London on a pretty comfortable allowance given him by his uncle…

He had been clearing away the breakfast things, but at the sound of the young master’s voice cheesed it courteously.

Bingo, while not absolutely rolling in the stuff, has always had a fair amount of the ready. [money]

The man was goggling. His entire map was suffused with a rich blush. [face]

If anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard…

Anyway, he was there, swinging a dashed efficient shoe. [dancing well]

‘What might you have missed?’ I asked, the old lemon being slightly clouded.

If he cut off my allowance, I should be very much in the soup. So you put the whole binge to Jeeves and see if he can’t scare up a happy ending somehow.

To round it all off, my Aunt Agatha had gone to France and wouldn’t be on hand to snooter me for at least another six weeks.

Never before had I encountered a curate so genuinely all to the mustard.

Little as he might look like one of the lads of the village, he certainly appeared to be the real tabasco.

I mean, even a chappie endowed with the immortal rind of dear old Sid is hardly likely to have the nerve to come back and retrieve these little chaps.’

‘Well, then, dash it, I’m on velvet. Absolutely reclining on the good old plush!’

I knocked but no one took any notice, so I trickled in.

Once a year Jeeves takes a couple of weeks’ vacation and biffs off to the sea or somewhere to restore his tissues.

‘Worships the ground you tread on, but can’t whack up the ginger to tell you so.’

‘And what might all this be, Jeeves?’ I said, giving the thing the glassy gaze.

‘I’m feeling frightfully braced, don’t you know!’

‘My jolly old guv’nor wouldn’t stick it at any price. Put the old Waukeesi down with a bang.’

‘Toodle-oo!’ I said sadly, and the blighter scudded off.

What with trying to imagine how Aunt Agatha was going to take this thing, and being woken up out of the dreamless in the small hours every other night to give my opinion of some new bit of business which Cyril had invented, I became more or less the good old shadow.

‘Well, never mind about him, Jeeves. Read this letter.’ He gave it the up-and-down.

I gave the couple the wary up-and-down…

‘Of course,’ I said, after I had given it the east-to-west, ‘I expected this, Jeeves.’

I mean to say, he sent me over here to broaden my jolly old mind and words to that effect, don’t you know, and I can’t help thinking it would be a bit of a jar for the old boy if I gave him the bird and went on the stage instead.

‘Isn’t she the most wonderful girl you ever saw in your puff?’ [in your life]

Few people have ever looked fouler than young Bingo in the fungus. [with a beard]

‘Well, when I tell you he got me through Smalls, you’ll gather that he’s a bit of a hummer.’

I found him eventually in his room, lying on the bed with his feet on the rail, smoking a toofah.

‘Bertie,’ said Claude, deeply agitated, ‘unless we take immediate action and do a bit of quick thinking, we’re in the cart.’

He started in about the female the moment we had begun to hoof it. [walk]

I can’t go chucking all my engagements every second week in order to biff down to Twing.

He gave one frosty look at the spats and biffed off.

The blighter had appeared from nowhere and was in my bed, sleeping like an infant with a sort of happy, dreamy smile on his map.

Anything merrier and brighter than the Twins, when they curveted into the old flat while I was dressing for dinner the next night, I have never struck in my whole puff. [life]

‘You heard about the binge, Bertie?’ [spot of bother]

‘He could use a bit of the right stuff paid every quarter, if you felt like unbelting.’ [money]

‘Something tells me that this show of his is going to be a frost.’ [failure, disaster]

‘This morning young Bingo went and jumped off the dock.’ [got married]

Posh abbreviations

The good old persp. was bedewing my forehead by this time in a pretty lavish manner. [perspiration]

I had just had one quick and another rather slower, and was feeling about as cheerio as was possible under the circs. [circumstances]

‘I think we’ve had about enough of the metrop. for the time being, and require a change.’ [metropolis i.e. London]

‘I’m beginning to wonder,’ said Eustace gloomily, ‘if there’s such a thing as a cert. in this world.’ [certainty – racing term]

We Woosters are all for the good old mediæval hosp. and all that… [hospitality]

I sent Jeeves a telegram saying I was coming, and drove straight to Bingo’s place when I reached town. I wanted to find out the general posish of affairs.

Verbs for entering or leaving a room

Jeeves poured silently in.

I then perceived that the stout stripling had trickled into the room.

About half-past ten next morning, just after I had finished lubricating the good old interior with a soothing cup of Oolong, Jeeves filtered into my bedroom…

He sallied forth,

Old Rowbotham took three and dropped the subject, and Jeeves drifted away.

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, who had just meandered in with my breakfast.

And then through the doorway there shimmered good old Jeeves in the wake of a tray full of the necessary ingredients…

Jeeves had materialised from nowhere, and was standing at my elbow.

The idle rich

The text has moments of self criticism or self awareness, albeit themselves played for laughs, one useless upper class layabout berating his pals for being useless upper class layabouts – the entire ‘serious’ world of politics, socialism and so on co-opted, emptied and turned into yet another trope for gags.

‘Good night!’
‘But, I say, George, old man!’
You didn’t get my last remark. It was ‘Good night!’ You Idle Rich may not need any sleep, but I’ve got to be bright and fresh in the morning.’

And:

I saw that the bearded chappie was pointing at us. ‘Yes, look at them! Drink them in!’ he was yelling, his voice rising above the perpetual-motion fellow’s and beating the missionary service all to nothing. ‘There you see two typical members of the class which has down-trodden the poor for centuries. Idlers! Non-producers! Look at the tall thin one with the face like a motor-mascot. Has he ever done an honest day’s work in his life? No! A prowler, a trifler, and a blood-sucker! And I bet he still owes his tailor for those trousers!’

Comic similes

Young Bingo is long and thin and hasn’t had a superfluous ounce on him since we first met; but the uncle restored the average and a bit over. The hand which grasped mine wrapped it round and enfolded it till I began to wonder if I’d ever get it out without excavating machinery.

I tottered back to my room to dress for dinner, feeling like a toad under the harrow.

At this point the brother, who after shedding a floppy overcoat and parking his hat on a chair had been standing by wrapped in the silence, gave a little cough, like a sheep caught in the mist on a mountain top.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

The stage seemed to stretch out in front of me like a trackless desert, and there was a kind of breathless hush as if all Nature had paused to concentrate its attention on me personally.

I could see that these harsh words had hit the old Bassington-Bassington family pride a frightful wallop. He started to get pink in the ears, and then in the nose, and then in the cheeks, till in about a quarter of a minute he looked pretty much like an explosion in a tomato cannery on a sunset evening.

On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James’s letter about Cousin Mabel’s peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle (‘Please read this carefully and send it on to Jane’), the clan has a tendency to ignore me.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

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by Simon on November 26, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Short stories

Tagged 1923, a cert, Aline Hemmingway, all to the mustard, Always Listen to Mother Girls!, argot, Ask Dad, Aunt Agatha, Bassington-Bassington, Bertie Wooster, biffs, bingo, Bingo Little, Blumenfield, braced, Brookfield, Charlotte Corday Rowbotham, cheese it, circs, Claude, clothes, Comic simile, comic stories, Cuddle Up, Cummerbund, Cynthia Wickhammersley, Cyril, Cyril Bassington-Bassington, Ditteredge Hall, Eustace, fiction, first person narrative, Francis Heppenstall, gambling, George Caffyn, Girton College, Goodwood races, Honoria Glossop, hoof it, humour, Jeeves, Jeeves and the Chump Cyril, Jeeves and Wooster, Lady Wickhammersley, Little’s Liniment—It Limbers Up the Legs, Lord Bittlesham, Lord Wickhammersley, Mabel, Marion Wardour, McGarry, Miss Mary Burgess, Miss Watson, Mortimer Little, Mr Heppenstall, Mrs Gregson, New York, Old Rowbotham, Oswald Glossop, P.G. Wodehouse, Reverend Francis Heppenstall, Richard 'Bingo' Little, Richard Little, Roderick Glossop, Rupert Steggles, short stories, short story, Sir Roderick Glossop, slang, Snooter, Soapy Sid, Spenser, story, the binge, the ginger, the glassy gaze, the good old plush, the immortal rind, The Inimitable Jeeves, the mazzard, the metrop, the old lemon, the old Waukeesi, the ready, the real tabasco, The Reverend Mr Wingham, the Strand, the whole binge, toofah, Wilfred Burgess, Woosters

Posted by Simon on November 26, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/the-inimitable-jeeves-p-g-wodehouse/

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1919)

I’m a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.
(Bertie Wooster stating the fundamental premise of the stories.)

The Jeeves and Wooster stories began during the First World War. Jeeves and Bertie first appeared in ‘Extricating Young Gussie’, a short story published in the US in September 1915 and in the UK in 1916. In the story, Jeeves’s character is minor and Bertie’s surname appears to be Mannering-Phipps.

The first fully recognisable Jeeves and Wooster story was ‘Leave It to Jeeves’, published in early 1916. Most of the Jeeves stories were originally published as magazine pieces before being collected into books.

Altogether the Jeeves canon consists of 35 short stories and 11 novels. With minor exceptions, the short stories were written and published first (between 1915 and 1930), the novels later (between 1934 up to as late as 1974).

My Man, Jeeves

The first collection to include fully formed Jeeves and Wooster stories is ‘My Man Jeeves’, published in 1919 although, of the eight short stories in the volume, only four are about J&W, the other four concern a character called Reggie Pepper.

Leave It to Jeeves* (February 1916)
Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest* (December 1916)
Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg* (March 1917)
Absent Treatment
Helping Freddie
Rallying Round Old George
Doing Clarence a Bit of Good
The Aunt and the Sluggard* (April 1916)

Jeeves and Wooster works

All four ‘My Man Jeeves’ stories were subsequently reprinted, some substantially rewritten, in the 1925 collection ‘Carry On, Jeeves’.

But before that collections came the first book consisting entirely of Jeeves and Wooster stories, 1923’s ‘The Inimitable Jeeves’. In this book 11 short stories originally published in magazines were reworked and divided into 18 chapters to make the first collection devoted entirely to J&W.

After this rather shaky start, the Jeeves series runs like this:

The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) – semi-novel consisting of eighteen chapters, originally published as eleven short stories
Carry On, Jeeves (1925) – ten stories
Very Good, Jeeves (1930) – eleven stories

Thank You, Jeeves (1934) – the first full-length Jeeves novel
Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) – second Jeeves novel
The Code of the Woosters (1938) – third Jeeves novel
Joy in the Morning (1946) – fourth Jeeves novel
The Mating Season (1949) – fifth Jeeves novel

Plus six further novels, but let’s see if I can read this lot first.

Comic hyperbole

There is a whole comic approach where you exaggerate the ordinary and everyday to dizzy heights of absurdity. In the tradition of learnèd wit (Rabelais, Erasmus, Swift, Sterne) the exaggeration is designed to highlight the absurdity of scholarly learning. In E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books it is to bring out the exquisite small-town bitchiness of the characters. In comedy like Wodehouse’s, the aim is to emphasise the utter uselessness of his empty-headed posh boys. Thus the mock heroic exaggerations of the trivialest things, rendered in absurdly affected argot.

‘What are your immediate plans, Bertie?’
‘Well, I rather thought of tottering out for a bite of lunch later on, and then possibly staggering round to the club, and after that, if I felt strong enough, I might trickle off to Walton Heath for a round of golf.’
‘I am not interested in your totterings and tricklings.’

Slang

A massive part of the pleasure derives from the posh-boy slang or argot which the narrator (Bertie Wooster) employs, with specialised words or phrases in almost every sentence. The slang – and the insouciant attitude behind it – is the most obvious way in which the text takes you into Wodehouse-world. Here are some quotes from just the first few short stories.

I forget now how I got it, but it had the aspect of being the real, red-hot tabasco.
[the real thing]

I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don’t you know.
[brain]

Now, a great many fellows think that having a rich uncle is a pretty soft snap.
[cushy position]

He has got a pippin of an idea.
[a cracker]

I don’t know why it is—one of these psychology sharps could explain it, I suppose… [psychologist]

Time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.
[pull a bone = made a mistake]

‘There are moments when I can almost see the headlines: “Promising Young Artist Beans Baby With Axe.”‘
[wallops, hits, strikes]

I patted his shoulder silently. My sympathy for the poor old scout was too deep for words.
[chap]

I as near as a toucher rebelled when he wouldn’t let me wear a pair of cloth-topped boots which I loved like a couple of brothers.

It will show you pretty well how pipped I was when I tell you that I near as a toucher put on a white tie with a dinner-jacket.

I didn’t want to have England barred to me for the rest of my natural.
[…days i.e. life]

I gave Motty the swift east-to-west.
[surveyed his appearance]

I was just starting to say that the shot wasn’t on the board at any price…
[this plan was not on]

It was as if he were deliberately trying to give me the pip.
[irritate him]

Motty was under the surface.
[drunk]

He can always be counted on to extend himself on behalf of any pal of mine who happens to be to all appearances knee-deep in the bouillon.
[in trouble]

I began to see that, unless I made the thing a bit more plausible, the scheme might turn out a frost.
[failure]

Devilish efficient sort of chappie, and looked on in commercial circles as quite the nib!

Synonyms for ‘man’

blighter
old buster
chappie
cove
fellow
gent
Johnnie
lad
sport

The point is there is a comic exuberance in this plethora of words, there is a joy of language, an infections smile triggered by the sheer multitude of terms Wooster reels off.

Comic quotes

She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.

I’m all for rational enjoyment and so forth, but I think a chappie makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan.

He picked up his glass and drained it feverishly, overlooking the fact that it hadn’t anything in it.

Jeeves

The moment I saw the man standing there, registering respectful attention, a weight seemed to roll off my mind. I felt like a lost child who spots his father in the offing. There was something about him that gave me confidence.

Jeeves is a tallish man, with one of those dark, shrewd faces. His eye gleams with the light of pure intelligence.

Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can’t do that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.

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by Simon on November 24, 2025 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on November 24, 2025

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Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers (1923)

His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.
(Chapter 1)

‘Hate anything tiresome happenin’ before breakfast. Takes a man at such a confounded disadvantage, what?’
(Chapter 1)

Lord Peter’s library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London.
(Chapter 2)

‘Worse things happen in war. This is only a blinkin’ old shillin’ shocker.’
(Chapter 2)

‘I don’t think much of your burglary, Bunter,’ said Lord Peter. ‘Competent, of course, but no imagination. I want imagination in a criminal.’
(Chapter 5)

‘When anybody comes blackmailin’ you, Gerald, or your first deserted wife turns up unexpectedly from the West Indies, you’ll realize the pull of havin’ a private detective in the family. ‘Delicate private business arranged with tact and discretion. Investigations undertaken. Divorce evidence a specialty. Every guarantee!’
(Wimsey mocking his hobby to his brother Gerald, Chapter 9)

Parker and Lord Peter were at 110 Piccadilly. Lord Peter was playing Bach and Parker was reading Origen when Sugg was announced.
(Origen! The very highbrow references which sit oddly beside Wimsey’s upper-class attitudes)

The surest and simplest method of making a thing appear to have been done is to do it.
(A murderer’s advice, Chapter 13)

Posh

I knew Lord Peter Wimsey was posh – obviously that’s indicated by his title – but I didn’t realise quite how much of a posh caricature he was:

‘Good-night, sir—good-night, dear lady—it’s simply rippin’ of you to let me drop in like this.’

Wimsey’s comedy, stagey upper-classness is really rammed home on every page, what with his loyal butler, his fastidiousness about clothes and cuisine, his comically upper class family with a village fete-opening dowager duchess for a mother, and so on and so on. Indeed every time he opens his mouth it’s to drop his h’s in the classic upper-class huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ manner.

‘Six bloomin’ medicos contradictin’ each other in the box, an’ old Impey elocutin’ abnormal cases from Glaister and Dixon Mann till the eyes of the jury reeled in their heads!’

And everywhere the effortless confidence of the natural-born aristocrat to handle any situation and any person, no matter how unpleasant, without losing his poise.

‘I don’t, fathead,’ said Lord Peter, with the easy politeness of the real aristocracy.

Peter’s profile

Lord Peter Wimsey is the second son of Mortimer Wimsey, the 15th Duke of Denver, deceased, and his wife, now the Dowager Duchess of Denver. She resides at the family home, the Dower House, Denver Castle, along with her eldest son, Gerald, who inherited the title and became the sixteenth Duke of Denver. His appearance?

The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat. (Chapter 3)

The name?

‘We always have a Peter, after the third duke, who betrayed five kings somewhere about the Wars of the Roses, though come to think of it, it ain’t anything to be proud of. Still, one has to make the best of it.’ (Chapter 4)

Peter had ‘the finest education’ – Eton and Balliol – and now resides at 110 Piccadilly West, in an apartment overlooking Green Park. He is attended by his loyal butler, Mervyn Bunter, as fastidious about Lord Peter’s clothes and shoes, ties and buttonholes and cane and hat, as Jeeves is for Bertie Wooster’s. For which he is paid the princely salary of £200 per annum.

Their relationship is explained a bit when we learn that Peter was a Major during the war and Bunter was his sergeant and batman. And even more, that Wimsey has shell-shock, and has vivid waking nightmares of life in the trenches, when Bunter has to calm him down, see him back to bed, and administer a sedative…

As to that cane:

‘I measured it with my stick—the gentleman-scout’s vade-mecum, I call it—it’s marked off in inches. Uncommonly handy companion at times. There’s a sword inside and a compass in the head. Got it made specially.’

Wimsey is a member of the Marlborough Club. He smokes a pipe.

With no work to occupy him, Lord Peter’s hobby is collecting rare books. But his real interest is an amateur activity as a freelance investigator or detective, a dilettante who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective. As the provincial solicitor Mr Wicks puts it, he is ‘a distinguished amateur of crime.’ And his mother:

The Duchess was always of the greatest assistance to his hobby of criminal investigation, though she never alluded to it, and maintained a polite fiction of its non-existence. (Chapter 1)

His motivation?

‘It’s a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I’d enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn’t know any of the people and it’s just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.’ (Chapter 7)

These classic detectives tend to have a dim police officer as a foil: for Sherlock Holmes it’s Inspector Lestrade, for Hercule Poirot it’s Chief Inspector Japp. For Peter, its Inspector Sugg at Scotland Yard, narrow, unimaginative, inflexible and always wrong. Wimsey has even coined a term, ‘Suggery’, to describe obtuse, clue-missing dimness (Chapter 10).

On the plus side, Wimsey is good friends and works well with a completely different type of copper, young Detective Charles Parker.

To an outsider

Late in the story, Parker secures the services of a medical student, Piggott, who he takes to Wimsey’s apartment where he is overawed by the luxury. Here’s how he sees Wimsey:

The friend was embarrassing; he was a lord, to begin with, and his clothes were a kind of rebuke to the world at large. He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but in a disconcerting way. He didn’t dig into a joke and get all the fun out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped 189away to something else before your retort was ready. He had a truly terrible man-servant—the sort you read about in books—who froze the marrow in your bones with silent criticism. (Chapter 10)

Quotes and literary references

Agatha Christie had an erratic education and did not go to university. Dorothy L. Sayers very much did go to university. Outstandingly clever at her boarding school, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French.

(Despite her examination results, she was ineligible to be awarded a degree, as Oxford did not formally confer them on women. When the university changed its rules in 1920, Sayers was among the first to have her degree officially awarded.)

This is important because the Wimsey stories differ from Christie and others in the field, not just because Wimsey is such an extraordinarily posh upper-class caricature – but because he and other characters, and the narrator, continually drop cultural references left, right and centre.

It starts with the way Wimsey is a bibliophile i.e. a collector of rare original editions of rare and ancient books. In fact the opening scene of the first novel depicts Wimsey en route to an auction of precious books and briefing his butler about which ones matter to him:

‘The Folio Dante nor the de Voragine—here you are—see? ‘Golden Legend’—Wynkyn de Worde, 1493—got that?—and, I say, make a special effort for the Caxton folio of the ‘Four Sons of Aymon’—it’s the 1489 folio and unique.’ (Chapter 1)

Other quotes and references include:

what Lord Beaconsfield described as a masterly inactivity

The golden mean, Sugg, as Aristotle says, keeps you from bein’ a golden ass.

‘you know, dear—just the proverbial way of putting things—like ‘a saint abroad and a devil at home’—only the other way on, reminding one of the Pilgrim’s Progress.’

‘He’s tough, sir, tough, is old Joey Bagstock, tough and devilish sly’ from Dickens

Sayers has Freke cite ‘Sludge the Medium’, the dramatic poem by Robert Browning. A little later Tennyson appears, then Shakespeare (OK, Christie regularly quotes the obvious Shakespeare). But even her dim socialite characters are relatively well-read.

‘One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers,’ said Lady Swaffham. ‘Like dramatists, you know—so much easier in Shakespeare’s time, wasn’t it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I’m sure if I’d been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I’d have said: ‘Odsbodikins! There’s that girl again!’’ (Chapter 7)

And the quotes aren’t just throwaway show-off references, they are frequently part of the woof and web of the character’s thoughts, for example the way the quote from Coleridge’s Xanadu crystallises the wider thought process going on in his mind:

He [Wimsey] traced out this line and that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far down—

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

At the breakthrough moment of the plot, Wimsey quotes the early Christian theologian Tertullian, entirely appositely.

Lord Peter Wimsey was not a young man who habitually took himself very seriously, but this time he was frankly appalled. ‘It’s impossible,’ said his reason, feebly; ‘credo quia impossibile,’ said his interior certainty with impervious self-satisfaction. (Chapter 8)

Later, after he cross-questions the medical student Piggott, Wimsey remarks that he remembers everything, ‘like Socrates’s slave’, a reference to Plato’s dialogue Meno.

In other words, the quotes aren’t bolted onto the narrative, but are a natural expression of how it thinks, of How Wimsey thinks. Of how the highly literate Sayers thought.

Even the unflamboyant professional, Parker, has surprisingly highbrow tastes.

Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. (Chapter 7)

Music

And not just quoting literature, nursery rhymes, folk songs and limericks; also music.

Lord Peter finished a Scarlatti sonata, and sat looking thoughtfully at his own hands. The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard grey eyes softened, and his long, indeterminate mouth hardened in compensation. At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead, accentuated by the brushed-back sleekness of his tow-coloured hair. Labour papers, softening down the chin, caricatured him as a typical aristocrat.
‘That’s a wonderful instrument,’ said Parker.
‘It ain’t so bad,’ said Lord Peter, ‘but Scarlatti wants a harpsichord. Piano’s too modern—all thrills and overtones.’

This is the high culture that an expensive education buys you.

Freud

He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club. It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s Physiological Bases of the Conscience, which he had seen reviewed two days before. ‘This ought to send one to sleep,’ said Lord Peter; ‘if I can’t leave these problems to my subconscious I’ll be as limp as a rag tomorrow.’

Intellectual

Sayers goes out of her way to make Wimsey seem like an upper-class fool and yet, at other moments, he is given intensely intellectual cerebrations (i.e. ways of thinking).

And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise. He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to think about it. He knew it.

There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and is required to make a word out of them, as thus:

C O S S S S R I

The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of letters, as:

S S S I R C

S C S R S O

Another way is to stare at the inco-ordinate elements until, by no logical process that the conscious mind can detect, or under some adventitious external stimulus, the combination:

S C I S S O R S

presents itself with calm certainty. After that, one does not even need to arrange the letters in order. The thing is done.

Or take the elaborate passage in Chapter 5, where Wimsey lays out all the possible scenarios which could explain the murder, in terms of five carefully worked-out hypotheses. But it isn’t just a brief paragraph, it goes on for page after page, it’s massive. And note how the posh huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ dropping of g’s and other upper-class mannerisms have completely disappeared. It reads like a textbook of logic. Here’s just part of it:

‘Yes,’ said Wimsey. ‘Then Possibility No. 3 is knocked on the head. There remain Possibility No. 1: Accident or Misunderstanding, and No. 2: Deliberate Villainy, of a remarkably bold and calculating kind—of a kind, in fact, characteristic of the author or authors of our two problems. Following the methods inculcated at that University of which I have the honour to be a member, we will now examine severally the various suggestions afforded by Possibility No. 2.

This Possibility may be again subdivided into two or more Hypotheses. On Hypothesis 1 (strongly advocated by my distinguished colleague Professor Snupshed), the criminal, whom we may designate as X, is not identical with Crimplesham, but is using the name of Crimplesham as his shield, or aegis. This hypothesis may be further subdivided into two alternatives.

Alternative A: Crimplesham is an innocent and unconscious accomplice, and X is in his employment. 97X writes in Crimplesham’s name on Crimplesham’s office-paper and obtains that the object in question, i.e., the eyeglasses, be despatched to Crimplesham’s address. He is in a position to intercept the parcel before it reaches Crimplesham. The presumption is that X is Crimplesham’s charwoman, office-boy, clerk, secretary or porter. This offers a wide field of investigation. The method of inquiry will be to interview Crimplesham and discover whether he sent the letter, and if not, who has access to his correspondence.

Alternative B: Crimplesham is under X’s influence or in his power, and has been induced to write the letter by (a) bribery, (b) misrepresentation or (c) threats. X may in that case be a persuasive relation or friend, or else a creditor, blackmailer or assassin; Crimplesham, on the other hand, is obviously venal or a fool.

The method of inquiry in this case, I would tentatively suggest, is again to interview Crimplesham, put the facts of the case strongly before him, and assure him in the most intimidating terms that he is liable to a prolonged term of penal servitude as an accessory after the fact in the crime of murder— Ah-hem! Trusting, gentlemen, that you have followed me thus far, we will pass to the consideration of Hypothesis No. 2, to which I personally incline, and according to which X is identical with Crimplesham.

This goes on for page after page – and even after the main disquisition is over, there’s a further discussion in similar tone and detail of whether Wimsey or Parker should go down to Salisbury to visit Mr Crimplesham.

‘Very well,’ said the detective, ‘is it to be you or me or both of us?’
‘It is to be me,’ said Lord Peter, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because, if (by Possibility No. 2, Hypothesis 1, Alternative A) Crimplesham is an innocent catspaw, the person who put in the advertisement is the proper person to hand over the property. Secondly, because, if we are to adopt Hypothesis 2, we must not overlook the sinister possibility that Crimplesham-X is laying a careful trap to rid himself of the person who so unwarily advertised in the daily press his interest in the solution of the Battersea Park mystery.’

Notice anything about the style? Gone are all the dropped h’s and upper-class affectations. Instead this is the plain prose of pure logic. It’s a revelation that this is what Wimsey, and Sayers, can be like when they want to.

Plot summary

Lord Peter Wimsey is on his way to an auction of antique books when his mother calls to say that an architect (actually a builder) named Thipps, has just found a naked corpse in his bath, in an apartment in Battersea. Intrigued, Wimsey gets his valet, Bunter, to go to the auction in his place while he takes a cab to Battersea.

Sure enough there is a naked man in Thipp’s bath, naked apart from a gold pince-nez on a chain. The police investigation is led by Inspector Sugg for whose slowness and obstinacy Wimsey has a healthy contempt. It’s Sugg who wonders whether the body is that of the well-known City financier Sir Reuben Levy, who has been reported missing from his house on the same night.

The investigation into Sir Reuben’s disappearance is being led by Inspector Charles Parker who is a friend of Wimsey’s.

Although the body in the bath superficially resembles Sir Reuben’s it quickly becomes clear that it is not him, and it initially appears that the cases may be unconnected.

Now Thipps’s flat is near a teaching hospital, St Luke’s, which suggests the possibility that the body might have been put in Thipp’s bathroom as a student prank. But this is contradicted by the surgeon and neurologist Sir Julian Freke, in charge of St Luke’s, who says no corpse is missing from his dissecting room.

In fact the body in the bath is eventually identified as the inmate of Chelsea workhouse who’d had an unpleasant accident (some scaffolding fell on his neck) and died a lingering death…

One red herring follows another, the biggest one being when Wimsey advertises in The Times for the owner of the pince-nez and gets a response from an elderly solicitor in Salisbury who he travels down to visit, with the comic effect that the old man refuses to believe Wimsey’s who he claims to be, until Wimsey is vouched for by his younger colleague. For a while one or either of them are suspects…

Another red herring relates to Thipp’s maid, Gladys Horrocks, who is discovered to have slipped out with her fancy man, Williams the glazier, and gone to a nightclub in Soho, which leads unimaginative Inspector Sugg to immediately arrest her.

And another one concerns a brash and confident American businessman based in London, one Mr John P. Milligan, who is a fierce business rival of Reuben’s and, at one stage, considered a suspect for this reason – despite the fact that he is charmed by the old Duchess into making a donation to the fund to restore her local parish church, and even to attend one of her village fetes.

We learn that bunter has an informed interest in cameras and uses the latest one that Wimsey buys him to take photos of fingerprints on suspect surfaces, then blow them up for analysis. A handy hobby for a gentleman detective’s man-servant.

A recurring comic thread is the loud, fearless abuse emitted by Thipp’s deaf old mother at anyone who goes near her.

There’s a long, long verbatim description of the inquest into the body in the bath, as attended by Parker and Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess.

Slowly out of the fog of details, and Wimsey’s own flippant attitude, clarity emerges until all the evidence starts to point towards the surgeon, Freke. Wimsey’s mother fills us in on some crucial backstory when she tells her son that Freke was in love with a young woman named Christine Ford, of a good country family, but that she fell in love with young handsome Levy and eloped with him, infuriating Freke, well… we have our motive, even though it happened 20 years earlier.

Slowly a series of circumstantial details create more links between the two cases, the unknown body in the bath and the mysterious disappearance of Levy.

It is Wimsey who connects the two but rather than go straight to the police, instead he goes to visit Freke in his capacity as nerve specialist, and tell him about the symptoms of his ongoing shell shock or PTSD, picked up in the recent war. This is another long dramatic scene because Wimsey manages to hint, through his answers to Freke’s extended questioning, that he (Wimsey) knows Freke is guilty. it leads up to a genuinely tense moment as Freke casually advises injecting a tranquiliser, and actually has a hypodermic in his hand and is about to stick it in Wimsey’s arm, when the latter grabs his hand in a vicelike grip (sic) and decides he won’t have the injection after all. Just as well; later, Freke confirms that it contained a lethal poison.

This is swiftly followed by another set-piece scene, in the cemetery where the dead man from the Chelsea workhouse was allegedly buried, which is the setting for his ghoulish disinterment. Various officials supervise the digging up of the coffin, its moving to an outbuilding, the bringing of a lamp and opening of the coffin, investigation of the body. The body is, as Wimsey predicted, not that of a pauper but of Reuben Levy.

But what really matters about the scene is the deliberately dramatic style Sayers writes it in, more Dickens than 1920s, with its gravel crunching underfoot and uneven headstones looming up out of the swirling fog, and the abrupt transition from the placid third-person narrator of most of the novel to a bracing second person.

The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men’s graves.
The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung on now for fear you should get separated. The dim people moving in front of you were like Brocken spectres.
‘Take care, gentlemen,’ said a toneless voice out of the yellow darkness, ‘there’s an open grave just hereabouts.’
(Chapter 12)

The identification of Reuben’s body, swapped for that of the pauper, clinches Freke’s guilt and so Wimsey tips off old Sugg who goes to make the arrest. In fact the cops are only in the nick of time because Freke, realising the game was up, was writing a complete confession and then planned to commit suicide by injecting the same poison he had intended for Wimsey.

Instead Freke is arrested and taken to prison, while Parker brings Wimsey the long suicide note the guilty man had written – which has the happy dual purpose of explaining every single detail of Freke’s cleverly-laid plan and thus tying up all the loose ends in a bow.

Except that, maybe it’s me but, I didn’t understand it. Even after carefully reading the ‘confession’ twice I have no idea why Freke went to the enormous trouble of lugging the corpse of the injured workhouse inmate up onto the roofs of the apartment block adjoining his hospital, and no idea at all why he then, for the lolz, decided to haul it through the open window of one of them, which he discovered was a bathroom.

What an idiot! The River Thames runs about 200 yards away from Prince of Wales Road where the hospital and Thipp’s apartment block were situated – why not dump it in there, last resting place of thousands of drownees and suicides. Why draw attention to a mysterious death right on his own doorstep?

In fact I don’t understand why he didn’t just murder Reuben and dump his body in the river. Why the whole elaborate and painstaking swapping of him for the body of the pauper, especially when Reuben was Jewish and so circumcised, while the body in the bath wasn’t.

If you understand why Freke did this and how the whole plot hangs together, please drop me a line to explain it, but until then I find the actual plot puzzlingly stupid. Good thing I don’t read detective stories for the plot but for the style, characterisation, themes and ideas and social history. The plots are nearly always pants.

Cast

Lord Peter Wimsey
Bunter – his valet
The Dowager Duchess – his mother – ‘She was a small, plump woman, with perfectly white hair and exquisite hands. In feature she was as unlike her second son as she was like him in character; her black eyes twinkled cheerfully, and her manners and movements were marked with a neat and rapid decision’
Gerald ‘Jerry’ Wimsey, sixteenth Duke of Denver – ‘a good, clean Englishman, sturdy and conventional, rather like Henry VIII in his youth’ – ‘The Duke considered his cadet rather degenerate, and not quite good form; he disliked his taste for police-court news’:

‘I do wish you’d keep out of the police courts,’ grumbled the Duke. ‘It makes it so dashed awkward for me, havin’ a brother makin’ himself conspicuous.’
‘Sorry, Gerald,’ said the other; ‘I know I’m a beastly blot on the ’scutcheon.’

- Soames – family butler
Mr Thipps – working class builder living at 59, Queen Caroline Mansions, Battersea, opposite Battersea Park, who finds the dead body of a naked man in his bath
- Gladys Horrocks – his maid
- William Williams – Gladys’s ‘young man’, a glazier
Mr and Mrs Appledore – Thipps’ disapproving neighbours in the Mansions
Sir Reuben Levy – City financier, self-made man, a Jew, who disappears mysteriously from his house the same night the body is found in Thipps’s bath
Lady Reuben Levy née Christine Ford
- Mrs Pemming
- Miss Mabel
- Mr Graves, valet
Inspector Sugg – obstinate unimaginative copper, Wimsey’s foil
Constable Cawthorn
Sir Julian Freke – directs the surgical side of big new St Luke’s hospital in Battersea, situated right behind Mr Thipp’s block of flats – in addition, known in Harley Street as a distinguished neurologist with a highly individual point of view, as expressed in the recently published book, Physiological Bases of the Conscience – ‘He was not only a distinguished man, but a striking figure, with his wide shoulders, upright carriage and leonine head’ – and Wimsey perceives him as: ‘A man taller than himself, with immense breadth of shoulder, and wonderful hands. A face beautiful, impassioned and inhuman; fanatical, compelling eyes, bright blue amid the ruddy bush of hair and beard’
- John Cummings – Freke’s man-servant
William Watts – the dissecting-room attendant at the hospital
Dr Grimbold – police doctor
Detective Charles Parker – happy to work with Wimsey – ‘Mr Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat at No. 12A Great Ormond Street, for which he paid a pound a week’
- Mrs Munns, who did for him by the day
Mr John P. Milligan – American businessman – London representative of the great Milligan railroad and shipping company – in some sense a rival of Reuben Levy
- Scoot – his secretary
Mr Crimplesham – ancient solicitor in Salisbury – his pince-nez is found on the corpse in the bath
Mr Wicks – junior in Crimplesham’s office
Lady Swaffham – friends of the Duchess
Mrs Tommy Frayle – especially dim friend of the Duchess: ‘Dear me!’ said Mrs Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, ‘what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!’
Mrs Freemantle – ‘wife of an eminent railway director, and celebrated for her ignorance of the world of finance. Her faux pas in this connection enlivened the tea parties of City men’s wives’
Mr Piggott – medical student
Mr Levett – represents the Home Secretary at the disinterment
The Master of the Workhouse
Dr Colegrove – the Workhouse doctor

Bookish

I thought it was just Agatha Christie who did this but Sayers, too, lards the book with characters who themselves refer to detective fiction, crime novels and so on. So I’m beginning to think it’s a feature or rule of the detective story genre itself that its characters are constantly referring to detective stories.

‘Look here, Wimsey—you’ve been reading detective stories; you’re talking nonsense.’ (Chapter 2)

‘No, I ain’t,’ said Lord Peter, sleepily, ‘uncommon good incident for a detective story, though, what? Bunter, we’ll write one, and you shall illustrate it with photographs.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn’t a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there’d have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara.’ (Chapter 4)

‘In this case, the method of inquiry will be to pump the respectable gentleman in Balham, and if he should happen to be a single gentleman with a deaf housekeeper, it may be no easy matter to impugn the alibi, since, outside detective romances, few ticket-collectors and ’bus-conductors keep an exact remembrance of all the passengers passing between Balham and London on any and every evening of the week.’ (Chapter 5)

‘The neuroses, you know, are particularly clever criminals—they break out into as many disguises as—’
‘As Leon Kestrel, the Master-Mummer,’ suggested Parker, who read railway-stall detective stories on the principle of the ’busman’s holiday. (Chapter 6)

Sherlock

And none of these authors can seem to escape the overarching shadow of Sherlock Holmes. They feel compelled to namecheck him, as if warding off an evil spirit. Here’s Wimsey giving a running commentary on himself as he cancels plans to go to a rare books auction and instead gets dressed to investigate a new case.

‘Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman.’ (Chapter 1)

Here he is joking with Detective Parker:

‘I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson.’ (Chapter 4)

Here’s his servant, Butler, complaining to Lady Levy’s servants:

‘Many’s the time I’ve sat up till three and four, and up again to call him early to go off Sherlocking at the other end of the country.’ (Chapter 4)

Wimsey himself, again:

‘Y’see,’ said Lord Peter, balancing a piece of duck on his fork and frowning, ‘it’s only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or’nar’ly, if somebody tells you somethin’ out of the way, you just say, ‘By Jove!’ or ‘How sad!’ an’ leave it at that, an’ half the time you forget about it.’ (Chapter 7)

And:

‘Hurray!’ said Lord Peter, suddenly sparkling. ‘I’m glad I’ve puzzled Parker. Gives me confidence in myself. Makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes. ‘Perfectly simple, Watson.’ (Chapter 9)

‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Duke, getting up and yawning.
‘Marching orders,’ said Peter, ‘back to town. Many thanks for your hospitality, old bird—I’m feelin’ no end better. Ready to tackle Professor Moriarty or Leon Kestrel or any of ’em.’ (Chapter 9)

And:

Lord Peter settled down to a perusal of his Dante. It afforded him no solace. Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public-school education. Despite Parker’s admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by ‘Raffles’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes‘, or the sentiments for which they stand. (Chapter 11)

The constraints of fiction

‘And in short stories,’ said Lord Peter, ‘it has to be put in statement form, because the real conversation would be so long and twaddly and tedious, and nobody would have the patience to read it. Writers have to consider their readers, if any, y’see.’

Antisemitism

I have – maybe rather tiresomely – pointed out all the instances of what I take to be antisemitism in the novels of Agatha Christie, her repeated use of anti-Jewish tropes and stereotypes, even after the Second World War when you would have thought everyone would have been more sensitive on the issue.

Disappointingly, something similar is true of Sayers. Why is the City financier a Jew? There were plenty of Gentile millionaires. Why is he a self-made man who prompts contempt in a more aristocratic person like Freke? And why is he depicted as marrying the good Gentile girl Christine Ford, stealing her from Freke? To be charitable, it speaks to the way detective stories are made of clichés and stereotypes. To be less charitable, it shows that Sayers was happy to deploy antisemitic tropes, pandering to the values of the day, in order to give her story recognition and popularity.

The anti-Jewish animus is conveyed in a long speech given to the posh Dowager Duchess explaining the rivalry between Sir Reuben Levy and Julian Freke over the girl Christine:

‘Christine Ford, she was then, and I remember so well the dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew. That was before he made his money, of course, in that oil business out in America. The family wanted her to marry Julian Freke, who did so well afterwards and was connected with the family, but she fell in love with this Mr Levy and eloped with him. He was very handsome, then, you know, dear, in a foreign-looking way, but he hadn’t any means, and the Fords didn’t like his religion. Of course we’re all Jews nowadays, and they wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d pretended to be something else, like that Mr Simons we met at Mrs Porchester’s, who always tells everybody that he got his nose in Italy at the Renaissance, and claims to be descended somehow or other from La Bella Simonetta—so foolish, you know, dear—as if anybody believed it; and I’m sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I’d much rather they believed something, though of course it must be very inconvenient, what with not working on Saturdays and circumcising the poor little babies and everything depending on the new moon and that funny kind of meat they have with such a slang-sounding name, and never being able to have bacon for breakfast…’ (Chapter 3)

But it isn’t just the Duchess’s view. Here’s Wimsey’s man, Bunter, buttering up Sir Reuben’s valet:

‘I agree with you, Mr Graves—his lordship and me have never held with being narrow-minded—why, yes, my dear, of course it’s a footmark, this is the washstand linoleum. A good Jew can be a good man, that’s what I’ve always said.’ (Chapter 4)

And here’s Wimsey himself, towards the end, explaining Freke’s long, long-standing resentment of Levy.

‘People are opinionated about side-issues, you know. I see red if anybody questions my judgment about a book. And Levy—who was nobody twenty years ago—romps in and carries off Freke’s girl from under his nose. It isn’t the girl Freke would bother about—it’s having his aristocratic nose put out of joint by a little Jewish nobody.’ (Chapter 10)

I know Bunter and Wimsey are broadly sympathetic to the Jewish character, I’m just left wondering why Sayers had the murdered financier be a Jew if she wasn’t catering to the crudest, melodramatic stereotypes.

A little feminism

‘Some blighter said hell knew no fury like a woman scorned. Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils. Sex is every man’s loco spot—you needn’t fidget, you know it’s true—he’ll take a disappointment, but not a humiliation.’

‘Stickin’ it on to women, poor devils.’ Well, it’s a gesture towards understanding how women were blamed in this culture. There’s not much of this kind of thing though. (In 1938 Sayers gave an address to a Women’s Society satirically titled ‘Are Women Human?’ which I hope to get round to reading and summarising, as an accompaniment to Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.)

The Great War and PTSD

It’s not only Wimsey who has prolonged shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. In the waiting room of Dr Freke, he sees:

By the fireplace sat a soldierly-looking young man, of about Lord Peter’s own age. 212His face was prematurely lined and worn; he sat bolt upright, his restless eyes darting in the direction of every slightest sound.

And then gets talking to a refugee from revolutionary Russia:

‘And you, monsieur? You are young, well, strong—you also suffer? It is still the war, perhaps?’
‘A little remains of shell-shock,’ said Lord Peter.
‘Ah, yes. So many good, brave, young men—’
(Chapter 11)

Credit

‘Whose Body?’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1923 by T. Fisher Unwin.

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by Simon on October 27, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 110 Piccadilly, A Room of One's Own, Agatha Christie, Antisemitism, Are Women Human?, Aristotle, Balham, Balliol, Battersea, Battersea Park, Bertie Wooster, bibliophile, Boccaccio, Brocken, Charles Parker, Christine Ford, Constable Cawthorn, crime novel, Crimplesham, Dante, Denver Castle, detective fiction, detective story, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dowager Duchess of Denver, Dower House, Dr Colegrove, Dr Grimbold, Duke of Denver, Epistle to the Galatians, Eton, Feminism, fiction, Freke, Freud, Gerald Wimsey, Gladys Horrocks, Great Ormond Street, Green Park, Harley Street, Inspector Sugg, Jeeves, Jerry Wimsey, Jewish, Joey Bagstock, John Cummings, John P. Milligan, Lady Reuben Levy, Lady Swaffham, Leon Kestrel, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Peter, Lord Peter Wimsey, Marlborough Club, Meno, Mervyn Bunter, Miss Mabel, Mortimer Wimsey, Mr Appledore, Mr Crimplesham, Mr Graves, Mr Levett, Mr Piggott, Mr Thipps, Mr Wicks, Mrs Appledore, Mrs Freemantle, Mrs Munns, Mrs Pemming, Mrs Tommy Frayle, neurology, novel, Oxford, Parker, Piggott, Pilgrim's Progress, Plato, post-traumatic stress disorder, Prince of Wales Road, Professor Moriarty, Professor Snupshed, PTSD, Queen Caroline Mansions, Raffles, Reuben Levy, River Thames, Robert Browning, Salisbury, Scarlatti, Scoot, Scotland Yard, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Julian Freke, Sir Reuben Levy, Sludge the Medium, Soames, Socrates, Soho, Somerville College, Sugg, Tennyson, Tertullian, Three Guineas, Times Book Club, Virginia Woolf, William Watts, William Williams

Posted by Simon on October 27, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/whose-body-dorothy-l-sayers/

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The Mixture as Before

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Trimmed

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Sir Roderick Spode

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Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

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This lax post-war world

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Comically dim references to classical literature

Forgetting words

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The pride of the Woosters

Bertram

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The formula

Jeeves and Bertie’s eternal battle over clothes

Holiday battles

Psychology

1. Jeeves and the Impending Doom (1926)

2. The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy (1926)

Inferiority complex

3. Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit (December 1927)

4. Jeeves and the Song of Songs (September 1929)

5. Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh (October 1929)

6. Jeeves and the Spot of Art (December 1929)

7. Jeeves and the Kid Clementina (January 1930)

8. Jeeves and the Love That Purifies (November 1929)

9. Jeeves and the Old School Chum (February 1930)

10. Indian Summer of an Uncle (March 1930)

11. The Ordeal of Young Tuppy (April 1930)

Cast

Bertie’s character

Slang

Bertie’s cheerful philistinism

Memorable moments

The stupid narrator

P.G. Wodehouse and Sherlock Holmes

Alas, the times

Freud

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