Treatment

What is plagiarism? Did you ever see a play by Freddie Lonsdale called The Last of Mrs Cheyney? It was about a society woman who was one of a band of crooks, and this is revealed to the audience at the end of Act I. An exactly similar situation was in an American play called Cheating Cheaters. And the big scene in Act II was where the hero gets Mrs Cheyney into his room at night and holds her up for something by saying he is going to keep her there till they are found in the morning, which is exactly the same as Pinero’s Gay Lord Quex. And yet nobody has ever breathed a word against Freddie for plagiarising. Quite rightly. The treatment is everything. [Performing Flea]

Wodehouse was to be plagued by plots throughout his writing life. The actual technique of writing held no perils for him. He could write quickly and felicitously. What he had to have, though, was something to write about. When he worked on a daily column for The Globe that was no problem, for that day’s news gave him something to bounce off. But the blank piece of paper held a terror for him if he was not sure of the structure of the piece that was to fill it. With that firmly fixed, he could write rapidly and without anxiety. In the many letters in Performing Flea never once does he complain of difficulties with the art of writing, though he did complain as he got older that he could not write so quickly. What he is always complaining of is the difficulty of getting plots. One method was simple plagiarism, as the full text of two letters which appear in abridged form in Performing Flea illustrate. These extracts were cut out when the letters were edited for publication:

I have got a new system for writing short stories. I take a Saturday Evening Post story and say, ‘Now, how can I write exactly the same story but entirely different?’ ... I have faith in the method. It at least does this - it sets one thinking, - and then some other plot on quite different lines emerges. [letter, 2 December 1935 to William Townend]

I find nowadays that the only way I can get plots is by reading somebody else’s stuff and working from there. I was reading a book the other day, called No Hero, where the fatal paper is hidden in a man’s flask, and the man, who has always been a ready drinker, suddenly decides to reform and so does not touch the flask. If I can’t get something out of that, I’m not the man I was.

I don’t think there is any objection to basing one’s stuff on somebody else’s, providing you alter it enough. After all, all one wants is motives. [letter, 6 May 1937, to William Townend]

The idea of the flask came into use in Money In The Bank. Wodehouse adapted the idea into the tobacco jar of a man who has given up smoking, and the item becomes some diamonds which Lord Uffenham wants as a dowry for his niece. The plot for Money In the Bank shows how Wodehouse would filter both his reading and real life experiences into his work. Lord Uffenham is a large, pear-shaped man with huge feet and a tendency to go into trances and impart strange bits of information unrelated to anything which might be going on around him. Wodehouse based this character on Max Enke, a man he knew in prison camp. Lord Uffenham has had to rent out his ancestral home, but he stays on in the guise of butler, hoping his memory of where he hid the diamonds will come back to him. The house, Shipley Hall, is based on Fairlawne, in Shipbourne, Kent, where Wodehouse’s step-daughter lived. It was not the first time this location had popped up in Wodehouse’s fictional world. In All’s Well For Bingo, a short story which, at that time, Wodehouse thought was the best he had yet written, Bingo Little is despatched by his novelist wife Rosie M. Banks to Monte Carlo to collect local colour for one her books, the hero of whom is Lord Peter Shipbourne. Wodehouse’s son-in-law was called Peter.

Wodehouse liked these in-jokes. In Sticky Wicket At Blandings, Lord Emsworth misremembers his daughter-in-law’s name as Frances Donaldson rather than Aggie Donaldson. Frances Donaldson was a friend of Wodehouse’s step-daughter, and later became his biographer. In Barmy In Wonderland, a court case is cited, Schwed versus Meredith. Wodehouse’s American publisher’s representative was Peter Schwed, and his American agent was Scott Meredith. In Big Business, Reginald Mulliner gets a letter from the solicitors Watson, Watson, Watson, Watson and Watson. Wodehouse’s American attorney at that time was Watson Washburn.

Shipley Hall in Money In the Bank is being run as a vegetarian, teetotal health establishment. This idea may well have come to Wodehouse through the obsession with food and straitened diet he and his fellow prisoners had to cope with.

Wodehouse would frequently gain inspiration from events in his own life. The plot for Money For Nothing centred on a fake burglary and was written a few months after Wodehouse’s Norfolk Street house had been burgled. In 1920 a conman tried to interest Wodehouse in shares in a dud gold mine. Wodehouse declined his invitation, but five years later came the publication of Sam The Sudden and the first appearance of Thomas ‘Soapy’ Molloy, an enthusiastic salesman of duff oil stock.

The solution to the mystery in Sam The Sudden turns upon the house Mon Repos being a much larger establishment later divided into two semi-detached homes. This, too, had its basis in Wodehouse’s own experience. Sam The Sudden is set in Valley Fields by which name Dulwich came to be known in Wodehouse’s fictional world. When Wodehouse’s parents lived in Dulwich they did so at a house in Croxted Road, one of two houses created out of a single residence. Writing a preface for the 1972 edition of Sam The Sudden, Wodehouse acknowledges that Valley Fields is Dulwich and hopes ‘that in the thirty years since I have seen it Valley Fields has not ceased to be a fragrant backwater. Though I did read somewhere about a firm of builders wanting to put up a block of flats in Croxted Road where I once lived.’ This news item had already been recycled into Company For Henry:

‘I met a man who has a house in Croxley Road... he was an old inhabitant and it was his opinion that all these building operations were turning Valley Fields from a peaceful rural retreat into a sort of suburban Manchester. He said he was thankful he was clearing out... he said he would be able to sell his house, because some syndicate or association or whatever you call these concerns wanted to build a block of flats in Croxley Road and his residence came right into the middle of the chunk of land they were planning to do it on.’

If Wodehouse wrote about a setting, he liked to have a particular place in his mind’s eye so he would know what it looked like. This applies equally to golf courses as to buildings as all his golfing stories were set at Great Neck golf club, where had been a member. This appears to have been for comfort rather than any practical benefit: could anyone recreate what any of his settings actually looked like, or work out the layout of the rooms in any of the country houses from his descriptions? Love Among the Chickens is dedicated to Joan, Effie and Ernestine Bowes-Lyon, grand-daughters of the 12th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne and first cousins of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. He would take tea with them at their London house and visited them at their country place at Lyme Regis. This is the setting for the novel. When he came to rewrite it for its 1921 publication he changed the name to Combe Regis. It was an oddity of Wodehouse’s that he would change names slightly, while still leaving the genesis obvious to anyone interested.

Hunstanton Hall, where Wodehouse stayed as a guest and also rented himself, is the setting for Money For Nothing, and the Octagon there pops up in the grounds of Aunt Agatha’s county house. At Hunstanton Hall Wodehouse would write seated in a punt in the moat, with his Monarch typewriter balanced on his knees.

Wodehouse had acquired this typewriter on his first visit to America, and was to rely on it, finding he could not get on with any other. He bought other models to replace it when it seemed beyond all resurrection, but he gave up on them and returned to his faithful Monarch. The company which had made it went out of business, which did not help his efforts to keep it up and running, but it was always patched up somehow, although by the end there was scarcely an original part left. He managed to acquire an identical model, but in time it had to be broken up to provide replacement parts for the original. No-one else was allowed to touch this typewriter, and wherever he went Wodehouse took charge of it on the journey. The typewriter was temperamental: if used too often it would break down, if too infrequently the keys would go stiff, and it required frequent ministrations from the typewriting doctor fraternity. In 1935 it finally expired, beyond all hope of redemption even though, as with those few he loved deeply, he was always ready to lavish money in its direction. It was replaced by a Royal, which in turn was replaced by an electric model in 1956. Electric was a viable option by then for he had settled down to one location; previously his typewriter had travelled with him, and he would write wherever he was - at the golf club, on a punt in a moat, on ocean liners. By 1956 all his writing was being done from his study at home.

Hunstanton was also behind the nomenclature of Lord Hunstanton who appears in The Small Bachelor. The names Wodehouse chose for his characters were frequently those of places he knew. The area around Hunstanton was particularly fertile ground in this respect and provided Wodehouse with the lords Heacham, Brancaster and Snettisham and the middle part of J. Sheringham Adair.

Wodehouse lived at Threepwood, which was across the way from Beach Road, Emsworth which gave him three of the names for his Blandings series. Lord Bosham and Lady Ann Warblington also take their names from the locality and Colonel Mant gets his name from the agent who used to oversee Threepwood when he was absent. Emsworth had been renowned for its oysters until a typhoid scare put paid to this local industry. This particular piece of Emsworth’s history is given to Belpher, Blandings alter ego.

Wodehouse’s first London lodgings were in Markham Square. He disliked them, and in Ukridge we are told that Markham Square is ‘a dismal backwater’ where Ukridge once had rooms. Ukridge has since moved to Arundel Street Leicester Square, where William Townend had digs. Arundell Street (with a double ‘l’) is where Ashe Marston and Joan Valentine are living at the start of Something Fresh. In 1913 Wodehouse stayed with Charles Bovill at an apartment in Prince Of Wales Mansions. This address pops up frequently. In Summer Lightning Ronnie Fish takes his intended to the family’s London house, 17 Norfolk Street (now Dunraven Street). This was Wodehouse’s townhouse. Aunt Dahlia’s London house, 47 Charles Street, was the home of Ian Hay, Wodehouse’s friend and collaborator on plays. Wodehouse would know the address well as he once worked by correspondence on a script with Ian Hay when he was in Hollywood.

Collaboration gave Wodehouse the ideas for many plots. Out of the £31. 5s 8d he made from Love Among The Chickens, Wodehouse gave Townend £10 for providing the raw material of the plot. The Luck Stone, an early trashy boys’ adventure story, was written in collaboration with Westbrook. Another magazine serial, A Man Of Means, was written in collaboration with Charles Bovill. Most of Wodehouse’s theatrical work was written in collaboration.

His theatre work also gave him the plots for many of his novels - and vice versa. Plays were turned into novels and novels into plays. A particularly notable example was The Old Reliable. As Edward Everett Horton was looking for a play with a strong butler’s role in it, Wodehouse adapted Spring Fever for the stage and Horton’s American audiences. Horton’s commitments prevented him from putting the play on, and, as the play was no longer a straight copy of Spring Fever, Wodehouse then set about re-adapting the play into a novel, thereby creating The Old Reliable.

Barmy In Wonderland was an adaptation of George S. Kaufman’s play The Butter And Egg Man. It took him three months to adapt and the pair split the royalties 50-50. It also uses Wodehouse’s recent experience of touring with a play where the leading actor was a drunk. Do Butlers Burgle Banks? was written from a play of Guy Bolton’s, Money In The Bank.

The most unsatisfactory novelisation of a play script is Ring For Jeeves. This comes from a play Guy Bolton wrote with Wodehouse called Come On, Jeeves. The theatrical background of the novel is obvious in the setting and action, but it works well as a story. But not as a Jeeves one, for Jeeves acts out of character. Had the butler part - and Jeeves is a butler in this novel - been given to another character then that would have been fine. As it is, the work detracts from itself as Jeeves ceases to be a credible character in this novel in light of what we know of him elsewhere. Jeeves got into the play as Bolton had written a major part for a butler, and asked his good friend Wodehouse if he could use the name Jeeves for this character, as it would be good for box office. (In fact it never received a West End run out, but it was performed in the provinces.) Wodehouse presumably persevered with Jeeves in this role when he came to write the script up as a novel because a Jeeves story would be good for book sales, too. Wodehouse the businessman had overcome Wodehouse the artist. But Wodehouse was always a businesslike writer. The writers he admired were those who turned out their regular amount of words for a decent income.

Wodehouse could also be ruthless with characters in his novels. Though short-story plots would be based around the characters concerned, with his novels the characters had to do, and be, what the plot demanded, hence such oddities as Monty Bodkin losing his aristocratic background because the plot requires it. Similarly the Empress of Blandings can sometimes be manhandled by a single person whereas at other times she requires a minimum of two to shift her according to the needs of the plot.

The novel Doctor Sally is based upon Wodehouse’s play Good Morning, Bill. This in turn had been based upon a play by the Hungarian Ladislas Fodor. Wodehouse would have worked from a translation of the original play. The Small Bachelor is based upon the musical comedy Oh, Lady! Lady! the second of the shows which Wodehouse, Bolton and Kern wrote for the Princess Theatre. But the plot has been vastly expanded as the original script ran to only 15,000 words, and so new characters and plot lines were added for the novel. Doctor Sally however is a very thin work, reflecting more slavish devotion to the script of the play, just as the novel If I Were You is also obviously a neat play in different clothing.

In taking the basis of a plot from another writer to create Doctor Sally, Wodehouse was only doing what he had done in the past. The idea for Uncle Fred Flits By was developed from a suggestion by William Townend, to whom Wodehouse would write asking if he had any spare plots which he might like to offload on his friend. For his part, Wodehouse would also make plot suggestions to Townend. The pair worked in very different genres and so while the ideas one had might well be unsuitable for their own work it could be relevant for the other. Another from whom Wodehouse would solicit ideas was Bob Davis, the editor of Munsey’s Magazine. Davis would suggest plots to his writers - Wodehouse admits they were not normally very good - and then buy the resulting story from them. From this process came The Coming Of Bill, a very strange Wodehouse product. It is a saga rather than a light novel and there are two deaths in it, including a friend of the hero. It concerns the falling apart of a marriage and the subsequent patching up of the union. Interestingly, this marriage is based on a brief courtship with the bride and groom hardly knowing one another. This is the basis of most of the happy endings in Wodehouse’s novels, but here it is suggested that it does not necessarily make for a happy foundation of married life. The force for bad in the book is provided by an aunt who butts in with her strange views on child rearing and also views the father of the child as ‘the enemy.’ The whole thing is a bit too unbelievable to take seriously as a real slice-of-life drama, but it is definitely closer to that than a light Wodehouse farce. Wodehouse’s talents were wasted writing a book like this.

Wodehouse could write about real people and situations - as a great adapter he frequently did - but he needed to clothe them with the Wodehouse treatment. The starkness of The Coming Of Bill makes it a strange bedfellow with most of the rest of the Wodehouse oeuvre. Wodehouse claimed that the plot did not matter, only the treatment, but here it shows that the plot does matter. If the plot is not suitable for the Wodehouse treatment, then the treatment cannot work. The failure of this novel illustrates Wodehouse’s great success elsewhere with this technique.

Many of Wodehouse’s characters are based on people he knew, either from meeting them or reading about them. That Spode leads the black shorts because all the shirts had run out is a masterly piece of satire by Wodehouse. Not only does it make Spode look as daft as the author is keen to make him out to be, but it also reflects the political situation at the time. The British Union of Fascists, whose leader Wodehouse was attacking in particular, wore black shirts, the British Fascist Association wore brown ones, Commander Locker-Hampton’s anti-Communists vigilantes were garbed in blue ones, Major Douglas’ Social Credit movement wore green shirts and the Independent Labour Party’s Guild of Youth took red shirts as their uniform.

Lord Tilbury, formerly Sir George Pyke, is based upon Lord Northcliffe. Tilbury House, the centre of the Pyke empire is given the same location as Northcliffe House. Blumenfield, who relies upon his twelve-year old son for his artistic decisions on the basis that what appeals to a twelve-year old will appeal to the general public, has copied Abraham Erlanger’s familial arrangement and methods of working.

It is not only the humans of Wodehouse’s acquaintance which made it into his work. When Wodehouse’s parents returned to England they bought a dog, a mongrel called Bob, who gets into the supporting cast, under his own name, in Love Among The Chickens. Ethel and Plum Wodehouse were also great dog lovers, and one of their pekes, Susan, gets a walk-on part in The Go Getter. Norman Murphy, in his fascinating In Search Of Blandings has shown that you can have a fair old stab at working out the chronology of Wodehouse’s books simply by knowing which dog he owned at the time as there are often references to them. For instance, the Mixer stories are written by a bulldog, which is the type of dog Wodehouse had at the time. The only dog the Wodehouses could not get on with was an Aberdeen terrier, which they gave away. Bertie Wooster could not take to this terrier either when it appeared in the chronicles as Stiffy Byng’s Bartholemew.

Ukridge and Lord Uffenham are based upon people Wodehouse knew as, in a different sense, was James Orlebar Cloyster. Psmith was based upon someone he had been told about. Once he had a character, or came across one, he could develop others from it. Psmith is the genesis of many of the characters in Wodehouse novels. Lord Ickenham is an obvious development of the Psmith character, but so too are figures such as Jimmy Crocker and Joe Vanringham, who appear in books published 20 years apart. Bertie Wooster is an evolution of another character Wodehouse wrote about, and this in turn was simply an adaptation of the typical stage dude figure. Sometimes no adaptation was required. Most of Wodehouse’s butlers are simply stage butlers. Lord Emsworth, an elderly man prone to absent-mindedness, is not a type of character previously unknown in the world of humorous writing.

With Wodehouse the genius lay in what he did with his raw materials, not the raw materials themselves. He just took what was already readily at hand and fashioned something on which was left his own imprint.

The quest for plots and incidents was a never-ending one. Wodehouse would buy them from others if necessary, or adapt those he came across. Gally was a member of the Pelican Club, whose activities provided Wodehouse with his basis for the Clothes Stakes in Uncle Fred In The Springtime, which is a retelling in adapted form of the story of The Great Hat Stakes, organised by Joe Scott, whereby the first hat to come through the door of the American Bar of the Criterion after 7pm would be the winner. Odds were offered on wide range of headgear, with a black top hat at 11-10, a bowler at 6-4 and 9-4 on an opera hat. Just after 7pm a waiter from a nearby restaurant came through the doors. He was an Indian waiter wearing a turban and was almost certainly bribed by Scott to make an entrance at that juncture. Scott leapt to his feet and embraced the Indian declaring ‘Twenty-eight and a half quid in the book and not a penny laid on it.’ Mustard Pott similarly cleans up with insider information in the Clothes Stakes, when first through the door is someone he has locked in the club’s telephone booth and who is still in his outfit from the previous night’s fancy dress party.

Sometimes Wodehouse’s inspiration is obvious, such as his short story Mr Potter Takes A Rest Cure which is his take on Saki’s The Lull, and his The Secret Pleasures Of Reginald, which was published in Vanity Fair in 1915, is so written that it could be slipped into a Saki anthology without many people noticing. Reginald is even the name of one of Saki’s main characters. There must be many long-forgotten stories in magazines which gave Wodehouse a germ of an idea to which he could give the Wodehouse treatment, but he also took inspiration from his own work. A regular short story plot is the young man behaving out of character to impress a girl he wants to marry, she being unsure if this would be a good match as he seemed too perfect, and some incident causes him to revert to his more typical behaviour, whereupon the girl realises that he was not as she had imagined and that he was her ideal mate after all. This idea even surfaces twice within the same collection of short stories, A Few Quick Ones in The Right Approach and Joy Bells For Walter. At least these appear as the third and eighth stories in the collection. In The Man With Two Left, the first story, Bill The Bloodhound is about Alice Weston, a chorus girl who is not prepared to marry out of the profession. The second story, Extricating Young Gussie, relies upon a father forbidding his daughter’s marriage to someone not on the stage.

The same ideas would come round time and time again, as would the same character-types. Wodehouse was aware of this, sending himself up nicely in his introduction to Summer Lightning:

A certain critic - for such men, I regret to say, do exist - made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

Once Wodehouse had the idea for a plot of a novel he would write out a detailed structure, often as much as a third of the length of the finished work. Into this he would also set down bits of dialogue in skeleton form to be written up later. It was the forming of the plot that was his main concern: he averred that he always thought that in writing the book he was wasting valuable time, as the difficult part of writing was in drawing up the plot. Beginnings of books often caused him problems and these would frequently be rewritten over and over again. He would have difficulties in organising the action so as to bring all of his major characters in to play a scene and making sure that the plot lines had been introduced evenly throughout the text. In Performing Flea he writes about Uncle Fred In The Springtime:

After writing 150 pages I have about 40 which are right. Every time I write a book I swear I’ll never write another with a complicated plot. In this one - in the first 40 pages - I have either brought on to play a scene or mentioned heavily each of my principal characters - ten including Lord Emsworth’s pig. So the going ought to be easier now.

Wodehouse felt that unless his plots moved slickly they were inclined to bore the reader. Often he would be left with loose ends and incongruities. Frequently one plus one cannot equal two for Wodehouse’s plot to work and normally he recognises this and puts in an explanation of why the obvious cannot happen. Sometimes, though, Wodehouse’s plots stretch credibility too far. In Sam The Sudden, Sam dispossesses a burglar of his trousers to prevent him scarpering while he toddles next door to hob-nob with the neighbours. Why does the burglar, left free to roam around Sam’s house, not just go upstairs and help himself to a pair of Sam’s trousers? The answer is that the plot needs Lord Tilbury to enter the house and be robbed of his trousers. Normally Wodehouse would have spotted the flaw, and written in some excuse as to why the burglar cannot just pinch a pair of Sam’s trousers, but here he forgets. French Leave, one of the most disappointing of his novels, leaves a lot of loose ends. What happens to the money Old Nick nicked from Mrs Pegler? What happened to the dossier Quibolle? Why does Old Nick have to escape using the balcony when the police do not know that he is a criminal? Too many characters have too little to do. Jo Trent just drops out halfway through. What was her point, except to have a maid called Fellowes? And, what, really was the need for that? Kate Trent does not really do anything, and she is neither the voice of authority nor does she provide an obstacle to be overcome. The novel is based, loosely, upon a play of Guy Bolton’s Three Blind Mice about three sisters who run a small farm and set out to blow their inheritance in a quest for husbands and happiness, but somewhere the whole has become a disjointed conjunction of ideas.

Once Wodehouse had sorted the plot out tightly then he was confident with the writing process and could steam ahead. Problems occurred when, as he termed it, the plot ‘went off the rails’ as he was writing it. When it was clear in his mind, and transferred neatly to the paper, the writing process would be very rapid. The final 40,000 words of Leave It To Psmith - in other words about the second half of the book - took him three weeks to write. Once he had got a completed story written he felt he had broken the back of the work, and could concentrate on the bit he particularly relished, the tinkering and polishing. As he got older this process took longer and played a greater part in the whole operation. In an interview in 1971 for The Guardian he told Richard Usborne:

I’m always re-reading and re-writing what I’ve written. You put it down straight first time. Then you fiddle with it, change it, change it again, and it gets better.

Frequently this revision process could also involve the changing of plots as ideas might be added or taken away, as could characters. The serial Uncle Fred In The Springtime, written for the Saturday Evening Post, is a case in point, as the magazine decided that the plot was too complicated to be followed on a weekly basis, and so Wodehouse dropped one plot line and a couple of characters. The novel as published in book form was the original, longer version. Magazine stories and serials could also be rewritten before being published in book form. Sometimes this could amount to minor tinkerings, at other times substantial rewrites, such as when he formed the novel Laughing Gas from a 16,000-word, four-part magazine series. Public complaints about the ending of Leave It To Psmith when it was serialised lead to Wodehouse writing a new ending for book publication. Novels would also get transformed into magazine series. The Swoop, which was only published in Britain, was rewritten in 1916 for Vanity Fair about an invasion of America.

American editions of his works were often slightly different from English ones, and occasionally there were major changes. Something New (the American title for Something Fresh) included a 20-page scene which was taken from Mike, which had not been published in America. When Wodehouse submitted The Luck of the Bodkins to the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine rejected it. In a much shortened - by about a quarter - version it was accepted by the Red Book in America and The Passing Show in Britain. The American book publication used the text of the magazine version, while his British publishers preferred the fuller, original version.

The Prince And Betty was originally written for an American audience, and received magazine serialisation in May 1912. The story was a straightforward romance. For book publication in America, Wodehouse interweaved the plot from Psmith, Journalist, which had been serialised in Britain but not America. However, in England A & C Black were to publish Psmith, Journalist, and so the British version of The Prince And Betty was published in its original form as a straightforward romance story, by Mills & Boon. As a further indication of how Wodehouse would reuse material, the American version of The Prince And Betty was rewritten as a five-part serial, A Prince For Hire, which appeared in the American Illustrated Love Magazine in 1931.

My Man Jeeves includes the only four stories about Reggie Pepper which made it into book publication (and then only in Britain). Reggie Pepper is the catalyst for Bertie Wooster. Wodehouse, the great adapter, fashioned the character of Reggie Pepper from that of the standard stage dude, and then modified this figure to create Bertie Wooster. But Wooster was not born as a fully formed character. The early Bertie Wooster still has strong traces of a stage dude about him, with the stories punctuated with lots of ‘don’t you knows’, just as the Pepper stories are. As Wooster evolved into a more rounded character over the course of these early stories, so too did Jeeves. Jeeves’ tastes also became more upmarket. In the magazine version of the sole short story narrated by Jeeves he calls Bertie ‘the guv’nor’. Wodehouse changed this for the book publication of this story to reflect a more educated Jeeves. The early Jeeves of My Man Jeeves is not the well-read Jeeves of later works.

The four Jeeves stories in My Man Jeeves were to reappear in Carry On, Jeeves. The plots of three of the Reggie Pepper stories were also to reappear. Doing Clarence A Bit Of Good becomes Jeeves Makes An Omelette, while Helping Freddie is reproduced virtually word for word as the Jeeves story Fixing it For Freddie, with Jeeves taking on the role played by one of Pepper’s friends. Rallying Round Old George later becomes a Mulliner story, George And Alfred. Only seven Pepper stories were published in magazines.

Reggie Pepper first appeared in September 1911 in Helping Freddie in The Strand. He is a young man about town, who lives off the wealth inherited from his uncle who was a colliery owner. He narrates his own tales and describes himself as ‘a chap who’s supposed to be one of the biggest chumps in London’. [Disentangling Old Percy] Pepper is a more self-centred character than Bertie. Bertie’s head is full of ideas of performing valiant deeds for his friends, and he has a strict code of honour. It is this which causes him problems. Reggie Pepper is less virtuous, and so has less of a chance to get into scrapes. Pepper is a more earthy character than Wooster:

‘Have you ever heard of Eunice Nugent?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘As she doesn’t sprint up and down the joy-way at the Hippodrome, I don’t suppose you would.’

I thought this rather uncalled for, seeing that, as a matter of fact, I scarcely know a dozen of the Hippodrome chorus. [Concealed Art]

‘The Booles have asked me down to their place for the week-end, and I don’t know whether to go or not. You see, they have family prayers at half-past eight sharp, and besides that there’s a frightful risk of music after dinner. On the other hand, young Roderick Boole thinks he can play piquet.’

‘I should go,’ I said. [Disentangling Old Percy]

Disentangling Old Percy, which did not make book publication, is the best of the Pepper stories. It is well plotted, with plenty of twists, and well written:

‘I hardly expected so sensible a suggestion from you, Reginald,’ she said. ‘It is a very good plan. It shows that you really have a definite substratum of intelligence; and it is all the more deplorable that you should idle your way through the world as you do, when you might be performing some really useful work.’

That was Florence all over. Even when she patted you on the head she did it with her knuckles.

The Florence in the story is Florence Craye, who with her brother Edwin was to appear in the Wooster chronicles. However by Wooster time her brother had become a boy scout; here he is her elder brother and is called Lord Weeting.

Reggie Pepper gets into fixes which he has to labour out of himself. He has no Jeeves to turn to, though his manservant appears in Rallying Round Old George and, whilst promising fidelity, double-crosses his master. The Good Angel features a butler, Keggs, who gets involved in manipulating the love lives of the guests for his own ends to ensure he wins the servants’ sweepstake as to whom the daughter of the house will marry. To this end Keggs rows out to an island to untie a boat so as to maroon a couple there, and offers advice on courtship to the guest whose name he has drawn. Wodehouse the great recycler returns to this idea in A Damsel In Distress, in which one of the sub-plots concerns Keggs the butler’s machinations to win the sweepstake, which involves blackmail and double-crossing. Whereas in The Good Angel the advice he offered was genuine, in the novel he offers deliberately misleading advice to Lord Percy, the eldest son of his employer, apparently in support of Lord Percy’s aims, but in fact to further his own interests only. The Good Angel - which was published in America as Matrimonial Sweepstakes - was collected into The Man Upstairs. Another story in this collection, By Advice Of Counsel, is about Gentleman Bailey double crossing a friend with advice on how to get married with the intention of keeping him single so as to maintain Gentleman Bailey’s way of life, which is supported by his bachelor friend.

Through these characters and situations Wodehouse was gathering together the ideas and characters which were to lead towards his greatest literary creation, the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster.