I used to dislike Wodehouse — I’d read one or two books back in the 90s, and I found those to be annoying and mannered. I don’t remember why now, but I decided to give him another go five years ago (oh yeah! the pandemic!), and… I loved it. So I bought a couple more, and I loved them, too, so I went and bought all his novels (in the Everyman’s Library editions, because I like the typesetting and the physical format).
And then I started reading chronologically, and I’m up to 1938 now. But I sorted the remaining books some weeks ago, and I discovered that I’d skipped a handful, so I thought I’d read those before continuing.
So this is from 1903, and is a short story collection. I hadn’t actually planned on reading Wodehouse’s short stories, too, but I must have bought this by mistake.
Wodehouse was born in 1881, and unless my university maths education fails me, that means that he was 22 when this was published. And like most of his earliest books, these are school boy stories originally published in magazines for school boys, which means that Wodehouse was writing about something he wasn’t far removed from.
And these are indeed very entertaining stories. They’re perhaps more… is “earnest” the right word?… than later stories. Less cynical, perhaps. And Wodehouse would never become a complex writer, but these stories are super duper straightforward.
It’s also fun to see how early he used some of his favourite expressions, like “Scarcely was he outside the promised ice cream” for “he ate the ice cream”, which Wodehouse used many variations from over the years…
The book is slightly oddly put together, though. Most of the stories are around eight pages long, but there’s a fifty page story in the middle. And then the book rounds out with three humorous essays, and then finally and essay in story form, and these things read like they were written a lot earlier. They read like they were written by a smart(-ass) seventeen year old, so now I’m going to google whether that’s the case.
“Work”
Published in Public School Magazine, December 1900.
OK, it was published when Wodehouse was nineteen, but it could be stuff he wrote while at school, eh? Eh?
Tales of St Austin’s (1903) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy new, buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)