Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse ( ; 15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr. Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. He wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies during and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, that played an important part in the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naive revelations of incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furore. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.
In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons; in 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After his release he made five broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the war. The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain, and a threat of prosecution. Wodehouse never returned to England. From 1947 until his death he lived in the US; he took US citizenship in 1955 while retaining his British one. He died in 1975, at the age of 93, in Southampton, New York, one month after he was awarded a knighthood of the Order of the British Empire (KBE).
Wodehouse was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career Wodehouse would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy. Some critics of Wodehouse have considered his work flippant, but among his fans are former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers.
Life and career
Early years Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a magistrate resident in the British colony of Hong Kong, and his wife, Eleanor, daughter of John Bathurst Deane. The Wodehouses belonged to a cadet branch of the family of the Earls of Kimberley. Eleanor Wodehouse was also of ancient aristocratic ancestry.Jasen, p. 2; and Donaldson, pp. 39–40 She was visiting her sister in Guildford when Wodehouse was born there prematurely.Donaldson, Frances. (1986) "Wodehouse, Sir Pelham Grenville" , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography archive, Oxford University Press, retrieved 25 April 2015
The boy was baptised at the Church of St Nicolas, Guildford,"Surrey's Famous people", Visit Surrey, retrieved 25 April 2015 and was named after his godfather, Pelham von Donop.Wodehouse and Ratcliffe, p. 30 Wodehouse wrote in 1957, "If you ask me to tell you frankly if I like the name Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, I must confess that I do not.... I was named after a godfather, and not a thing to show for it but a small silver mug which I lost in 1897."Wodehouse, Over Seventy, p. 46; also, slightly reworded, in author's preface to 1969 reissue of Something Fresh, p. 2 The first name was rapidly elided to "Plum", the name by which Wodehouse became known to family and friends.McCrum, p. 9
Mother and son sailed for Hong Kong, where for his first two years Wodehouse was raised by a Chinese amah (nurse), alongside his elder brothers Philip Peveril John (1877–1951) and Ernest Armine (1879–1936).McCrum, p. 14 When he was two, the brothers were brought to England, where they were placed under the care of an English nanny in a house adjoining that of Eleanor's father and mother.
The boys' parents returned to Hong Kong and became virtual strangers to their sons. Such an arrangement was then normal for middle-class families based in the colonies.Donaldson, p. 43 The lack of parental contact, and the harsh regime of some of those in loco parentis, left permanent emotional scars on many children from similar backgrounds, including the writers Thackeray, Saki, Kipling and Walpole.Donaldson, p. 43 (Kipling); Hart-Davis, p. 20 (Walpole); and Usborne, p. 43 (Thackeray and Saki) Wodehouse was more fortunate; his nanny, Emma Roper, was strict but not unkind, and both with her and later at his different schools Wodehouse had a generally happy childhood.Jasen, p. 5Wodehouse, Over Seventy, p. 16 His recollection was that "it went like a breeze from start to finish, with everybody I met understanding me perfectly". The biographer Robert McCrum suggests that nonetheless Wodehouse's isolation from his parents left a psychological mark, causing him to avoid emotional engagement both in life and in his works.McCrum, pp. 16–17 Another biographer, Frances Donaldson, writes, "Deprived so early, not merely of maternal love, but of home life and even a stable background, Wodehouse consoled himself from the youngest age in an imaginary world of his own."
In 1886 the brothers were sent to a dame-school in Croydon, where they spent three years. Peveril was then found to have a "weak chest";Wodehouse, quoted in Jasen, p. 8 sea air was prescribed, and the three boys were moved to Elizabeth College on the island of Guernsey. In 1891 Wodehouse went on to Malvern House Preparatory School in Kent, which concentrated on preparing its pupils for entry to the Royal Navy. His father had planned a naval career for him, but the boy's eyesight was found to be too poor for it. He was unimpressed by the school's narrow curriculum and zealous discipline; he later parodied it in his novels, with Bertie Wooster recalling his early years as a pupil at a "penitentiary... with the outward guise of a prep school" called Malvern House.Jaggard (1967), p. 104
Cheney Court, Ditteridge, a large 17th-century house near Box in Wiltshire, was one of Wodehouse's homes while his parents were living in Hong Kong. His grandmother died in 1892, after which he was largely brought up by his aunts, including the writer Mary Bathurst Deane,Easdale, Roderick (2014). The Novel Life of P. G. Wodehouse, p. 40 the original of Bertie Wooster's fictional Aunt Agatha."Box People and Places: The Shadow of Mary Deane", boxpeopleandplaces.co.uk, accessed 9 March 2024Kemp, Sandra, ed. (1997) Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (Oxford University Press), p. 92 In 1955 Wodehouse wrote "Aunt Agatha is definitely my Aunt Mary, who was the scourge of my childhood."Murphy, p. 21
Throughout their school years the brothers were sent to stay during the holidays with various uncles and aunts from both sides of the family. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Iain Sproat counts twenty aunts and considers that they played an important part not only in Wodehouse's early life, but, thinly disguised, in his mature novels, as the formidable aunts who dominate the action in the Wooster, Blandings, and other stories. The boys had fifteen uncles, four of whom were clergymen. Sproat writes that they inspired Wodehouse's "pious but fallible curates, vicars, and bishops, of which he wrote with friendly irreverence but without mockery".Sproat, Iain. (2010) "Wodehouse, Sir Pelham Grenville (1881–1975)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, retrieved 24 April 2015
At the age of twelve in 1894, to his great joy, Wodehouse was able to follow his brother Armine to Dulwich College.McCrum, p. 24 He was entirely at home there; Donaldson comments that Dulwich gave him, for the first time, "some continuity and a stable and ordered life". He loved the camaraderie, distinguished himself at cricket, rugby and boxing, and was a good, if not consistently diligent, student.Jasen, p. 17 The headmaster at the time was A. H. Gilkes, a respected classicist, who was a strong influence on Wodehouse. In a study of Wodehouse's works, Richard Usborne argues that "only a writer who was himself a scholar and had had his face ground into Latin and Greek (especially Thucydides) as a boy" could sustain the complex sequences of subordinate clauses sometimes found in Wodehouse's comic prose.Usborne, p. 26
Wodehouse's six years at Dulwich were among the happiest of his life: "To me the years between 1894 and 1900 were like heaven."Wodehouse, Performing Flea, Letter of 7 March 1946, p. 135 In addition to his sporting achievements he was a good singer and enjoyed taking part in school concerts; his literary leanings found an outlet in editing the school magazine, The Alleynian.Jasen, p. 18 For the rest of his life he remained devoted to the school. The biographer Barry Phelps writes that Wodehouse "loved the college as much as he loved anything or anybody".Phelps, p. 63
Reluctant banker; budding writer: 1900–1908
Wodehouse expected to follow Armine to the University of Oxford, but the family's finances took a turn for the worse at the crucial moment. Ernest Wodehouse had retired in 1895, and his pension was paid in rupees; fluctuation against the pound reduced its value in Britain. Wodehouse recalled, "The wolf was not actually whining at the door and there was always a little something in the kitty for the butcher and the grocer, but the finances would not run to anything in the nature of a splash".Wodehouse, Over Seventy, p. 19 Instead of a university career, in September 1900 Wodehouse was engaged in a junior position in the London office of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He was unsuited to it and found the work baffling and uncongenial. He later wrote a humorous account of his experiences at the bank,Wodehouse, Over Seventy, pp. 19–21, and 24–27 but at the time he longed for the end of each working day, when he could return to his rented lodgings in Chelsea and write.Donaldson, p. 57 At first he concentrated, with some success, on serious articles about school sports for Public School Magazine. In November 1900 his first comic piece, "Men Who Missed Their Own Weddings", was accepted by Tit-Bits.Jasen, pp. 22–23 A new magazine for boys, The Captain, provided further well-paid opportunities, and during his two years at the bank, Wodehouse had eighty pieces published in a total of nine magazines.Jasen, p. 25
In 1901, with the help of a former Dulwich master, William Beach Thomas, Wodehouse secured an appointment—at first temporary and later permanent—writing for The Globes popular "By the Way" column. He held the post until 1909.Jasen, p. 45 At around the same time his first novel was published – a school story called The Pothunters, serialised incomplete in Public School Magazine in early 1902, and issued in full in hardback in September.McCrum, pp. 52–53 He resigned from the bank that month to devote himself to writing full-time.McCrum, p. 47