‘set thy beetle-crusher on the ladder of fame’
‘All through my last term at Dulwich I sprang from my bed at five sharp each morning, ate a couple of petit beurre biscuits and worked like a beaver at my Homer and Thucydides.’ Aged seventeen, Wodehouse was preparing for university scholarship examinations, aiming to win a place at an Oxford college. Eric George had been in the year above Wodehouse, and had left Dulwich in 1899 to take up a place at Oriel, which was now Wodehouse’s college of choice. Armine was also up at Oxford, having won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College that year.
The slangy intimacy of this early correspondence takes its tone from the prevailing culture of schoolboy expression, which would be familiar to any reader of The Boy’s Own Paper. Wodehouse combines this with his borrowings from, and homage to, established writers of the Victorian age. Wodehouse’s nickname for George – ‘Jeames’ – is taken from Thackeray’s parodic Punch sketch, ‘The Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche Esq.’ (1845), the story of a footman turned millionaire. In a playful extended allusion to his separation from Eric George, Wodehouse impersonates Jeames’ jilted admirer, the ‘hilliterit cookmaid’, Maryanne Hoggins, who laments Jeames’ absence in doggerel – ‘But O! imagine vot I felt / Last Vensday veek as ever were; I gits a letter, which I spelt / “Miss M. A. Hoggins, Buckley Square.”’
TO ERIC GEORGE
Old House,
Stableford,
Salop.
[Summer 1899]
My only Jeames.
I am badly in need of some funny drorks to write pottery about.1 Send some at your earliest convenience, or sooner if you can.
I am vorking till Vensday at St Margaret’s Bay.2 I am going to try for a Schol at Oriel. At least that is my ambition. I don’t think I shall get one. When does the exam come off, do you know? It would be ripping if we could both (or as the Scotch say ‘baith’) be at the same college. ‘It would be monstrous nice now’. I wrote a pome to you some time ago about the inadvisability of painting ‘them saints & suchlike’. It is since dead!
Do you know, Jeames, I think your pome anent Mr Roop is a gem of the first water.3 I consider the splendid burst of triumphant joy in the last line, where our author says ‘There ain’t no wulgar among the blest’ is without a par (or ma) in the English langwidge! Have just finished Pendennis & Esmond. Rattling good books both of them. Now how kind it is of me to encourage an obscure author by such a favourable criticism, isn’t it. I presume you know both by heart. I think that place where Blanche says to Foker: ‘How lovely it must be to have a Father, Mr Foker!’ & he says: ‘Oh! uncommon!!’ is grand.4 I heard from our unique V.T. some time ago & answered his letter with promptitude, so to speak. He is rather sick at leaving. I think it shows what an awfully fine chap he is that he gives up going to Varsity. I know he would have liked to go awfully, poor chap. I don’t know what I shall do without him at the House.5 We used to have rows every other day, but they never lasted long, generally departing with his toothache!
I read some Browning today. I still like Tennyson better, though. I think some of the descriptions of nature in T. are absolutely whacking. Eg in the ‘Voyage of Maeldune’,
‘The whole isle-side flashing down from the peak without ever a tree’.
Heck mon, its just beutiful! [sic]
Goodbye now.
Write soon and often.
Yrs till chaos
P. G. Wodehouse.
1 George was a talented artist. His letters to his friends were abundantly illustrated with ‘drorks’.
2 PGW was presumably staying with his Aunt Edith Deane and her husband, Commander Augustus Bradshaw, who took a house at St Margaret’s Bay in Kent.
3 George’s poem about ‘Mr Roop’, a joke between the pair, alludes to the Indian ‘rupee’. Until his retirement and return to England in 1895, PGW’s father, Ernest Wodehouse, had been a judge in Hong Kong, and his Civil Service pension was paid in rupees. PGW recalls that this currency ‘was always jumping down and throwing fits [...] “Watch that rupee!” was the cry in the Wodehouse family’ (Over Seventy, p. 477).
4 W. M. Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond (1852). PGW quotes Miss Amory’s declaration: ‘Oh how delightful it must be to have a father – a father, Mr Foker!’ from The History of Pendennis (1848).
5 William Townend (V.T.), PGW’s best friend at Dulwich College, had turned down a place at Cambridge University (‘Varsity’) in order to study to be a commercial artist.
P. G. Wodehouse to Eric Beardsworth George, summer 1899.
TO ERIC GEORGE
Old House.
Stableford.
Salop.
Sept. 1899.
Jeames, friend of me boyhood, & companion of me youthful years, list, I prithee. Your letter was very welcome & prompt. I have not answered it before because I have been wurking! That scholarship at Horiul, Jeames me lad, is a certainty. I am a genius. I always knew it.
I haven’t read Faust but I have read Palamon and Arcite right through, 3000 lines if it’s an inch! It is rather a good poem full of blud and luv!
I will apprise you of the visiting Sunday when I get back, as I don’t know yet when it is. It has always been the ambition of my life to share your ‘storied urn & animated bust’.1 I shall sponge on you frightfully when I come up for my Schol! I am going to spend nearly all next term up at Oxford trying for various Schols! Ho yus, Jeames, I mean to do it in style.
Have you done your Saints yet? If not have you done anythink in the papers?
I come back to school on Tuesday. I arrive about 5, so if I come to drag you out for a walk, be not afraid with any amazement, as they say in the marriage service.2 Which I know you’ve been married heaps of times, Jeames, so you ought to know it.
I heard yesterday that Shakespeare was not alive. It steeped me in profound gloom. But I thought eftsoons that I was alive so it was all right for the Literature of the World. I am writing a 9-act tragedy called Julius Othello or Lycidas regained. Talking of Browning, Jeames, (not that we were talking of him), he is not nearly so obscure as a bloke called Henley.3 Have you read any of his rot. Here is a sample: –
‘A sigh sent wrong,
A kiss that went astray,
A pain life-long
So they say!’
Iggsplane this, men & angels, as Thackeray says. Isn’t it rot?4 Have you read Esmond. I liked it awfully. Have you ever noticed that Thackeray can’t draw a good woman without making her a lunatic like Mrs Pendennis, who never says anything without raising her eyes in soulful ecstasy or silent pain to the ceiling. It is wery vearin’, as you remark.
You will just have time for a letter before I come back. Mind you write.
Goodbye now
Yrs through the ever-rolling streeemes of tyme,5
P. G. Wodehouse (+ his mark)
P. S. When you say Faust, do you mean Marlowe’s play? Reply paid.
PGW
1 Dryden’s long poem Palamon and Arcite (1700). Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) – ‘Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath’ – evokes the idea of hidden genius, ‘some mute inglorious Milton’ that never saw the light.
2 ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as it is fit in the Lord […] even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement’, ‘The Form of Solemnisation of Matrimony’, The Book of Common Prayer.
3 William Ernest Henley’s Poems had been published in 1897.
4 For ‘Iggsplane this, men and angels’, see Thackeray’s Epistles to the Literati (1840).
5 The joke on ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream’, from Watt’s hymn ‘O God, Our help in Ages Past’, would have been recognised by all Dulwich College boys. Daily attendance at Chapel was central to public school life.
In 1899, Wodehouse became one of the five editors of the Dulwich College school magazine, The Alleynian – an achievement that he compares, by way of an allusion to Samuel Johnson’s ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, to that of Charles XII of Sweden (‘He left the Name, at which the World grew pale / To point a Moral, or adorn a Tale’). Wodehouse’s comic poetry, modelled on his literary hero, W. S. Gilbert, was published in the magazine.
A sketch from a letter from Eric Beardsworth George, depicting life at Oriel.
TO ERIC GEORGE
Space
Today
Jeames of me boyhood’s hours, best congraggers on the commission to illustrate a real live book. Thou art the first of the 3 genii to set thy beetle-crusher on the ladder of Fame! By the time I begin to write you will be such a terror to the publishers etc that you will get me countless commissions, or I’ll know the reason why, so to speak.
I am a heditor myself, Jeames, now. I write those Editorials in the Alleynian at which the world grows pale.
Oh! you young Warsity blud, you! I will leap up to Oxon for the Half term like a young sparrow. I shall have to get leave, unless you can prove you are an uncle or parent of mine. If you see Mr J KB Dawsoon break it to him gently that I can’t find a photo at present, but have ordered a cart-load for him from Bayfield’s. I am getting werry emaciated now, has I am training for the Bedford match.1
I am werry proud, having seen myself in the Tonbridgian called ‘the school Lorryit’. ’Sblood!2
What do you think of Ernest Prater’s drorks? They are monstrous nice, I think.3
The gay Billiam T. has got to draw 6 hours a day for his two years!4 Losh, mon, it’s uncanny.
I sing by night, I sing by day!
My voice gets werry hoarse!
I love to watch the salmon play,
Then gaily wend my homeward way,
Refreshed with onion-sauce.
My mother bids me bind my hair.
Shall Britons ever slave?
Never! and so I always spare
The life of every ex-Lord-Mayor
Beneath the ocean wave.
(Poetry)
I find life werry hollow, Jeames, now you have gone to Warsity. I sit & smoke & spit. At other times I stand & smoke & spit, and sigh!
Simple Fare (a pome).
I loathe all needless luxuries,
I loathe your regal bread & cheese,
I also loathe with loathing utter
Your enervating bread & butter.
Be mine a simple hardy fare,
A devilled kidney here & there,
Château Lafitte [sic] & ancient port.
Such is the fare I’ve always sought.
My friends declare I’m growing stout,
My doctor darkly hints at gout,
But till I seek the realms above,
Such simple fare I’ll always love.
Yrs till the mausoleum
P. G. Wodehouse-Shakespeare
P.S. Write soon & send some pictures for pomes. PGW.
1 Another Dulwich College boy, J. K. B. Dawson had gone up to Exeter College in July 1899.
2 In one of the earliest reviews of PGW’s work, the magazine of a rival public school reports that The Alleynian contains a poem by ‘the school laureate “P.G.W.” […] on purely Hypothetical subjects, which is in our opinion a trifle obscure, to say nothing of a rather ambiguous rhyme’, The Tonbridgian, 1899 (July), p. 1647.
3 Ernest Prater (1864–1950), an illustrator for, among others, The Strand, Pall Mall Gazette and The Boy’s Own Paper.
4 William Townend.
Eric George’s illustration of candidates heading for Oxford examinations, bearing their cribs and ‘Key to Euripides’.
The scholarship examinations were fiercely difficult, and Wodehouse had been preparing for months. The papers of 1899 required candidates to translate extracts from Plato, Thucydides, Theognis, Cicero, Propertius and the younger Pliny, as well as to write essays on ‘The Literary Man as Statesman’, the comparative ‘aims and achievements of Frederick the Great and Napoleon’ and the extent to which ‘the modern novel [is] a substitute for the Elizabethan drama’. But Wodehouse was never to go to Oxford, or even to take the scholarship exams. ‘[J]ust as scholarship time was approaching, with me full to the brim with classic lore […] it seemed to my father that two sons at the University would be a son more than the privy purse could handle.’
Wodehouse never elaborated on his father’s reasons for preventing him from going to Oxford; it was an unspeakable blow. For years, he had been reading stories in the pages of The Captain about the joys of being a ‘’Varsity “man”’. For his fictional heroes in The Captain, life at the ‘quaint old coll’ was like Dulwich, only better – ‘almost like going to Elysium’. Wodehouse’s brother, Armine, was already excelling at Oxford – he went on to achieve a double First (first class degree) in Classics as well as to win the Newdigate Prize for English verse.
Ernest’s plans for his third son were quite different. Wodehouse was to leave Dulwich and become a clerk in the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. For Ernest, the path before his son now seemed set. Pelham Grenville would begin in the bank’s London office. And before too long, it was expected that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, heading out to the Far East.
TO ERIC GEORGE
Elm Lawn1
Dulwich Common
SE
Friend of me boyhood, here’s some dread news for you. My people have not got enough of what are vulgarly but forcibly called ‘stamps’ to send me to Varsity. Damn the last owed is wot I know you will say. Oh! money, money, thy name is money! (a most lucid remark). I am going into the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. For two yrs I will be in England from the time I am 19. So I will have 2 yrs to establish myself on a pinnacle of fame as a writer.
I vote you get your publisher pal to start a paper. (NB this is wrote serious.) You & WT could do the drorks, & you & I could do the writing. ’Tis a gorgeous scheme. I have a brain that could fill 3 papers with eloquence wit & satire if need be. You have a pencil & brush like those of Rossetti & E T Reed combined.2 Damn it, man, (so to speak!) it’s a grand scheme. For about £15 you can get 1000 copies published. We will get 1000 people to pay a yearly subscription at 6d per week & there you are. You clear £10 per week. It is an amazingly fine scheme. Write and criticize it.
V.T. was down here on Wednesday, drunk as usual. I hit him on the chest, knocked his bowler in & went on my way with a lightened heart, feeling I had not vasted my morning.
Write an illustrated letter to me soon. Also send me some drawings (small) to write pomes on.
I am going to send some pomes to a few editors soon. Let us hope the boodle will flow in. I think Pearson’s Weekly is about my form, or perhaps Pick-Me-Up.3 NB our paper will consist of interviews, pomes, drorks (comic & serious), an editorial, & reviews of books. That is about all.
Goodby enow
Write soon
Yrs till Chaos
P. G. Wodehouse
1 Elm Lawn was PGW’s boarding house.
2 Edward Tennyson Reed (1860–1933), Punch cartoonist and parliamentary caricaturist.
3 PGW refers to some of the newer Victorian periodicals – Cyril Pearson (previously at Newnes) launched his journal in 1890; Pick-Me-Up, another British weekly, began in 1888 and by 1897 was retailing at a penny per issue.