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The Code of the Jeeveses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
It is well-known that Jeeves’s first appearance was in a story called ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ in which he had two modest lines. Bertie is firmly, if crudely, established in it, although his name is fairly definitely Mannering-Phipps. Aunt Agatha makes her first appearance there. A little earlier in this, the second decade of the century, Wodehouse produced a scattered series of short stories for the Strand featuring an I/r-Bertic, Reggie Pepper. Some, though not all, of these were reprinted in the collection My Man Jeeves: the Pepper stories were still Pepper, although four Wooster stories set in America were added. These latter were reprinted in Carry On, Jeeves six years later and, as noted above, one Pepper story was Woosterised. Decades later more of the Pepper stories were reworked: ‘Doing Clarence a Bit of Good’ became ‘Jeeves Makes an Omelette’, one of the only two Jeeves short stories to appear after 1930, and ‘Rallying Round Old George’ was refashioned, to its disadvantage, as a very late Mulliner, ‘George and Alfred’. One point of interest in the latter reworking is that a Prince was changed to a movie mogul. What is not known is that an uncollected Reggie Pepper, ‘Disentangling Old Percy’, appeared in the Strand for August 1912 (Vol. XLIV, 219-29), bringing Florence Craye into the world. ‘Percy’ was not her father, but her brother.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 1976 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 See The Man With Two Left Feet (published 1917) and Wodehouse, preface to World of Jeeves, viii.
2 And badly arranged with World of Jeeves, chs. 6, 8 and 9 beginning the book and ch. 10 ending it (i.e. chs. 2‐5 in Carry On, Jeeves), leaving ‘Absent Treatment’, ‘Helping Freddie’, ‘Rallying Round Old George’ and ‘Doing Clarence a Bit of Good’ stuck in the middle for the reader to sort out.
3 ln A Few Quick Ones. Curiously enough, the other post‐1930 Jeeves short story, ‘Jeeves and the Greasy Bird’, is also fairly clearly modelled on an uncollected Reggie Pepper story or draft. See Performing Flea, 107. Even as it stands now the story is more seedy in theme than one expects from a Jeeves piece, although not from Pepper‐land. The revision has its problems: it is amusing to encounter Honoria Glossop mated up to Blair Eggleston of Hot Water (published 1932) but Jas. Waterbury, who skinned Freddie Widgeon, cannot be the same person as Jos. Waterbury, who habitually touched him (‘The Masked Troubadour’, Young Men in Spats). All in all Reggie Pepper made a good ancestor but proved in poor shape at resurrection‐time.‘Jeeves and the Greasy Bird’ first appeared in Plum Pie, and both stories conclude World of Jeeves as chs. 33 and 34.
4 Plum Pie. World of Mulliner, ch. 40. Wodehouse, as shown by the novels, was still doing fine work, but his frequent cannibalisation of old short story plots in his later years testifies to the fact that infrequent use of the medium was giving him a sense of loss of mastery there.
5 Written just after The Inimitable Jeeves. Ch. 1 of Carry On, Jeeves and World of Jeeves.
6 World of Jeeves, 3, altering ‘bosom of the family’(Carry On, Jeeves, J, 12) to ‘bosom of the f.’, a form in keeping with the matured Wooster style of the novels, and a further means of Wodehousian send‐up of cliché. It supplies a good instance of the kind of minor revision he gave to old stories.
7 The first story of My Man Jeeves. Under the former name, ch. 2 of Carry On, Jeeves, ch. 6 of World of Jeeves.
8 Save in Something Fresh where the chauffeur is Slingsby—again a much‐used name, that of the butler in If I Were You, the author of Strychnine in the Soup (World of Mulliner, ch. 26) and the Superb Souper who sought to sue Bertie (World of Jeeves, ch. 26).
9 Published 1970. A most unpleasant bounder, but his great performance wins him a curtain call and an encore song in partnership with the most attractive character in the book. The most pointed use of a curtain‐call in all of the novels of the very theatre‐minded Wodehouse.
10 The most admirable crook in Wodehouse whose reversal of the conventions often produces agreeable crooks and unpleasant police but never quite to this degree of polarisation.
11 George Orwell, ‘In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse’, Collected Essays. Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell, Vol. 3, P. 396 (Feb. 1945).
12 In his Oscar Wilde—a Summing‐Up (1941), whose critical insights are not contemptible when the author can forget about his own wrongs.
13 The choice of the Strand texts may have been made with some notion that they provided a narrative more easily interwoven with the stories of Carry On, Jeeves which stretch over a longer period extending both before and after the time‐span of the earlier book. The original Jeeves Omnibus (published 1931) also sought to allow for the difference in authorship by having the one Jeeves narrative ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’ originally ch. 10 of Carry On, Jeeves, placed at the end. But this jettisons the chronological method since Bertie's horror of girls’ schools heightening the tension in ‘Jeeves and the Kid Clementina’ is dependent on the Jeeves‐told narrative which appears after it. The whole thing is reduced to absolute confusion in World of Jeeves where the two late stories, with Bertie narrative, are placed after ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’: the result is that the stories are chronological save that ch. 32 is certainly before ch. 27.
14 Inimitable Jeeves, P, 29‐33. The Aunt Agatha addition is all to the story's advantage: ‘You should be breeding children to ….’‘No, really, I say, please!’ I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women's clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn't in the smoking‐room.
15 lnimitable Jeeves, P, 159. World of Jeeves, 193. Hugh Kingsmill's parody in The Table of Truth acknowledges this.
16 ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’, Carry On Jeeves, J, 33. World of Jeeves, 17.
17 Published 1938. It will be remembered that there were two schools of thought as to the origins of the Bassett wealth‐inheritance in the conventional view, and sticking like glue to the fines imposed in the Bosher Street Magistrate's Court according to Bertie (ibid., 7).
18 Published 1960. There are several subtleties in this narrative, including jokes for the constant reader, notably Sir Roderick Glossop's increasing similarity to Bertie. In Thank You, Jeeves this was merely a matter of bootpolish, but by now it is deeper than skin. On this point of the nastiness of the wealthy and powerful. Senator Opal, the fanatical Dry whose letter to his bootlegger is misdirected, is almost unique in his bullying hypocrisy and constitutes surely the vilest politician in Wodehouse (Hot Water): even Mr Bickersdyke has merely turned his coat as opposed to wearing both sides at once. Mencken should have approved of Hot Water, save that Opal is not the hick he represented Dries as being, but rather an absolutely unscrupulous cosmopolitan. Tt is Wodehouse who has realism on his side.
19 Inimitable Jeeves, P, 62‐63. 77. World of Jeeves, 43, 53. The omnibus does clear up the confusions about Aunt Agatha's name: Gregson in The Inimitable Jeeves, Spenser in Carry On, Jeeves, Spenser Gregson in Very Good, Jeeves with a butler named Spenser in The Inimitable Jeeves and Purvis in Very Good, Jeeves. In The World of Jeeves she is definitely Spenser Gregson and the butler is safely Benson.
20 P, 73‐74 et passim. There is an analogy with Lord Emsworth's swift movement from awe revering genius to disgust at obvious insanity in relation to the Efficient Baxter in Leave it to Psmith. But Bertie at least refrains from Emsworth's later dithyrambs:‘The adjectives mad, crazy, insane, gibbering—and, worse, potty—had played in and out of his conversation like flashes of lightning. And from the look in his eye she gathered that he was still saying them all over again to himself’. (Summer Lightning, J, 293.)
21 Staying in Steeple Bumpleigh for Jeeves's fishing, and retaining Jeeves's narrative of Bertie's disasters in the archives of the Junior Ganymede.
22 Summer Lightning, J, 254, 277; and 255‐65, 284, 275‐76.
23 Performing Flea, P, 22‐23. Of course, Aunt Agatha is a very liberal development of Moriarty. The leading conservative derivative work is that by T. S. Eliot.
24 Wodehouse to Townend, 12th September 1935, Performing Flea, P, 95.
25 Heroes of Modern Adventure: Mr Mitchell Hedges Among the Monsters of the Deep.