Many readers of this journal undoubtedly have the British history bug, but what might be the best way to satisfy it? The hard road is through weighty tomes and learned lectures by professors and other scholarly killjoys. For those of us who prefer a spoonful of sugar with our medicine, such knowledge is easier to digest when added to a comedy stew. The Wodehouse canon is therefore an ideal teacher. As we meet characters like Uncle Fred and Bertie Wooster and visit venues like Blandings and the Drones Club, we learn a great deal about the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
If only school had been this fun; history classes could do worse than to use the works of Plum as a textbook. If read carefully, they provide an excellent education in the politics and government of a Britannia that still ruled the waves.
In this essay, we specifically consider the many references to political and social reformers. They range from do-gooders to radicals and from upper-crust busybodies to working-class socialists. The Wodehouse canon is populated, as were the Victorian and Edwardian eras, with organizations and individuals seeking to help the “deserving poor” and make the world a better place, regardless of what the poor and the world thought about this. Plum not only records their presence but also portrays the self-righteous bustling of a Lady Malvern and the armchair radicalism of a Lavender Briggs as worthy of gentle mockery – and perhaps some grudging respect.
As with my previous essays on how the world of Wodehouse is suffused with politics, the books and short stories discussed below were not chosen by any type of scientific method. On the contrary, they just happen to be the slices of the canon I read most recently.
Social Reform
The Victorian and Edwardian eras were filled with do-gooders who helped the downtrodden, whether by delivering “a few pints of soup to the deserving poor” (“Anselm Gets His Chance”) or “giving the local backslider the choice between seeing the light or getting plugged in the eye” (Service with a Smile). In Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Pongo learns from the report of Claude “Mustard” Pott that “You didn’t catch The Subject doing good to the poor or making a thoughtful study of local political conditions.”
In Cocktail Time, Sir Raymond Bastable reflects upon how “a thoughtful study of conditions in the poppet-value industry” would have been more helpful to his parliamentary ambitions than a best-selling scandalous novel. Wikipedia indicates that a poppet-valve actually exists and is “typically used to control the timing and quantity of petrol (gas) or vapour flow into or out of an engine, but with many other applications.” I cannot find more online, so we might regret that Sir Raymond focused his attention on the “obscene, immoral, shocking, impure, corrupt, shameless, graceless and depraved” behavior of the younger generation rather than the presumably oppressed workers in this industry.
In Service with a Smile, we encounter several instances of noblesse oblige:
“Lady Constance has pinched his favorite hat and given it to the deserving poor.”
“She’d read that book Limehouse Nights, and she was curious to see the place.”
“Apparently when she lived in London, she used to mess about in Bottleton East, doing good works among the poor and all that.”
In Uneasy Money, when London solicitor Jerry Nichols explains to Bill the last whims of Ira J. Nutcombe, he parodies the charitable causes of the rich: “It’s a moral certainty that if he hadn’t met you he would have left all his money to a Home for Superannuated Caddies or a Fund for Supplying the Deserving Poor with Niblicks. Why should you blame yourself?”
At the conclusion of “Aunt Agatha Takes the Count” (and in the chapter “Pearls Mean Tears” in The Inimitable Jeeves), the epic struggle between Bertie and Jeeves over a bright scarlet cummerbund is resolved:
I unstripped the cummerbund and handed it over.
“Do you wish me to press this, sir?”
I gave the thing one last longing look. It had been very dear to me.
“No,” I said, “take it away; give it to the deserving poor. I shall never wear it again.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” said Jeeves.
Sometimes the impulse for social reform extends throughout the Empire. In “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest,” Bertie is landed with the knob-sucking Lord Pershore by a formidable friend of his formidable Aunt Agatha:
While I was dressing I kept trying to think who on earth Lady Malvern could be. It wasn’t till I had climbed through the top of my shirt and was reaching out for the studs that I remembered.
“I’ve placed her, Jeeves. She’s a pal of my Aunt Agatha.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Yes. I met her at lunch one Sunday before I left London. A very vicious specimen. Writes books. She wrote a book on social conditions in India when she came back from the Durbar.”
She soon elaborates on her work:
“I am leaving New York by the midday train, as I have to pay a visit to Sing-Sing prison. I am extremely interested in prison conditions in America. After that I work my way gradually across to the coast, visiting the points of interest on the journey. You see, Mr. Wooster, I am in America principally on business. No doubt you read my book, ‘India and the Indians’? My publishers are anxious for me to write a companion volume on the United States.”
We catch a hint that her research, and that of other hoity-toity writers in this self-regarding genre, is not all it could be:
“I shall not be able to spend more than a month in the country, as I have to get back for the season, but a month should be ample. I was less than a month in India, and my dear friend Sir Roger Cremorne wrote his ‘America from Within’ after a stay of only two weeks.”
In “Chester Forgets Himself,” Felicia Blakeney comes from a family of activists:
“Her father is a distinguished writer on sociological subjects; her mother is Wilmot Royce, the well-known novelist, whose last work, Sewers of the Soul, was, you may recall, jerked before a tribunal by the Purity League. She has a brother, Crispin Blakeney, an eminent young reviewer and essayist, who is now in India studying local conditions with a view to a series of lectures.”
An Internet search lists several groups and movements from the era whose names included the word “purity,” such as the National Purity League and the Social Purity Movement. Their concerns seemed to revolve around what we might call personal mores rather than social reform. One does wonder what the Bishop of Stortford, so offended by Cocktail Time, would have said about Sewers of the Soul.
Another vaguely named do-gooder organization is the “Social Progress League at Lewisham” mentioned in A Damsel in Distress. According to the Madame Eulalie annotation by Terry Mordue:
Whether a real Social Progress League existed (in England; there was one in New Zealand) has not been established, but as a generic name it could cover a wide range of activities. Lady Caroline’s attitudes would tend to rule out socialism, women’s suffrage, or anything else that might alter the existing social order: the temperance movement, welfare for “fallen women,” and similar worthy causes would seem more likely to attract her energies.
Eugenics
The study of social conditions and the study of the downtrodden often overlapped with eugenics in the early years of the twentieth century. As I discussed in the Spring 2022 Plum Lines (“P. G. Wodehouse as Political Humorist”), when Wodehouse references the subject, he attempts to play it for laughs. Eugenics was not very funny, however, as it drew moral and intellectual conclusions about populations and individuals based on everything from flawed social statistics to random physical features. It was popular in the early twentieth century but fell out of favor in the postwar period due to associations with the Nazis. In Uncle Dynamite, we see an example of one discredited idea:
“How is Lady Ickenham?”
“Fine.”
“Fine. She once tipped me half a crown.”
“You will generally find women loosen up less lavishly than men. It’s something to do with the bone structure of the head.”
The subplot in Uncle Dynamite about the “bonny baby contest” featuring “forty-three babies of almost the maximum repulsiveness” ties in with long-standing albeit shifting debates about population. For much of the twentieth century, so-called experts were concerned about overpopulation as well as whether the “right” people were reproducing, certainly not a humorous topic. While Plum’s antipathy toward babies and children is well known, eugenicists reading this story would have shaken their heads at the number of babies born in a backwater village. Today, when Britain and many other global north nations are more concerned about population decline and its concomitant political and policy challenges, the presence of several dozen babies in one small village would be a demographer’s dream.
In Bill the Conqueror, eugenics finds its way into a story via Professor Appleby:
“My name . . . is possibly not familiar to you, but in certain circles, I think I may assert with all modesty, my views on Eugenics are considered worthy of attention. I am a strong supporter of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s views on the necessity of starting a new race.”
According to the Guardian, George Bernard Shaw once wrote that “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man” and that “the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.”
Such views do not go unchallenged, however. Later in Bill the C., we read the stunned reactions of the family to Appleby’s comments: “I never heard of such a thing in my life!” “The fellow’s a dangerous crank!”
At the start of Uneasy Money, Lord Dawlish (“Bill” to almost everyone) is approached by a beggar who claims his children have not tasted bread in days:
The anti-race-suicide enthusiast with the rubber rings did not call Lord Dawlish Bill, but otherwise his manner was intimate.
We later learn that Claude Nutcombe “Nutty” Boyd has few good qualities, aside from being Elizabeth’s brother. One of our lesser objections to his character is that he is not a man who wishes to stay informed about current affairs, and the reason for such an aversion may be found in eugenic theory:
Nutty never read. Newspapers bored him and books made his head ache. And as for thinking, he had the wrong shape of forehead.
Radicalism: Socialism, Bolshevism, and Communism
Historians rarely associate humor with the “Heralds of the Red Dawn” and other revolutionaries. Longing to hang the aristocracy from lamp-posts on Park Lane may dampen one’s appreciation of the lighter side of life.
In Wodehouse, by contrast, humor and various political and economic isms go hand in hand. Following are some additional references as well as further context that supplement those I noted in previous essays.
George Cyril Wellbeloved is described in Service with a Smile as “no feast for the eye, having a sinister squint [and] a broken nose acquired during a political discussion at the Goose and Gander in Market Blandings.” Lavender Briggs also holds radical views:
When holding a secretarial post, she performed her duties faithfully, but it irked her to be a wage slave … Like George Cyril Wellbeloved, whose views were strongly communistic, which was how he got that broken nose, she eyed the more wealthy of her circle askance. Idle rich, she sometimes called them.
She later learns more about his political vision:
“And how did he get his riches? By grinding the face of the poor and taking the bread out of the mouths of the widow and the orphan. But the red dawn will come,” he said, warming up to his subject. “One of these days you’ll see blood flowing in streams down Park Lane and the corpses of the oppressors hanging from lamp-posts. And His Nibs of Dunstable’ll be one of them. And who’ll be there, pulling on the rope? Me, and happy to do it.”
Lavender Briggs made no comment on this. She was not interested in her companion’s plans for the future, though in principle she approved of suspending Dukes from lamp-posts.
And then later: “Miss Briggs came with the highest testimonials. She is a graduate of the London School of Economics.”
The London School of Economics was associated with radicalism from its founding days, perhaps fairly and perhaps not. Nevertheless, some Wodehouse readers in the 1960s would have taken an LSE degree as very strong evidence that her views, like those of Nietzsche, were “fundamentally unsound” (“Jeeves Takes Charge”).
Money for Nothing includes multiple mentions of socialism:
“It’s just this modern lawlessness and Bolshevism. There was a very tough collection of the Budd Street element standing at the back, who should never have been let in. They started straight away chiyiking the vicar during his short address.”
“We had just got to that bit about digesting the venom of your spleen though it do split you, when the proletariat suddenly started bunging vegetables.”
“No. It was simply this bally Bolshevism one reads so much about.”
“You think these men were in the pay of Moscow?”
“I shouldn’t wonder.”
“That’s what makes me so sure the thing was an organized outbreak and all part of this Class War you hear about.”
“A few more swift ones from the cellarette in the dining-room and the depression caused by the despicable behaviour of the Budd Street Bolshevists might possibly leave him altogether.”
In Uncle Fred in the Springtime, we ponder the life of Leon Trotsky when he took a break from stirring up revolutions: “I’ll bet Trotsky couldn’t hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.”
We read the following exchange between Uncle Fred and Sally Painter in Uncle Dynamite:
“Though I suppose you know you’re an anachronistic parasite on the body of the State? Or so Otis says. He’s just become a Communist.”
“He has, has he? Well, you can tell him from me that if he starts any nonsense of trying to hang me from a lamp-post, I shall speak very sharply to him. Doesn’t he like Earls?”
“Not much. He thinks they’re blood-suckers.”
“What an ass that boy is, to be sure. Where’s the harm in sucking blood? We need it, to keep us rosy. And it isn’t as if I hadn’t had to work for my little bit of gore.”
In a previous essay I mentioned the brief socialism of Archibald Mulliner. Here are the related thoughts of his cousin Mervyn in “The Knightly Quest of Mervyn” (Mulliner Nights):
Extremely bleak the world looked to my cousin’s unfortunate son, and he was in sombre mood as he wandered along Piccadilly. As he surveyed the passing populace, he suddenly realized, he tells me, what these Bolshevist blokes were driving at. They had spotted – as he had spotted now – that what was wrong with the world was that all the cash seemed to be centred in the wrong hands and needed a lot of broad-minded redistribution.
Where money was concerned, he perceived, merit counted for nothing. Money was too apt to be collared by some rotten bounder or bounders, while the good and deserving man was left standing on the outside, looking in. The sight of all those expensive cars rolling along, crammed to the bulwarks with overfed males and females with fur coats and double chins, made him feel, he tells me, that he wanted to buy a red tie and a couple of bombs and start the Social Revolution. If Stalin had come along at that moment, Mervyn would have shaken him by the hand.
Alaric “Ricky” Gilpin, the costermonger conqueror and beefy poet in Uncle Fred in the Springtime, says this to his Uncle Alaric, the Duke of Dunstable, who refused to support his onion soup bar investment: “You are without exception the worst tick and bounder that ever got fatty degeneration of the heart through half a century of gorging food and swilling wine wrenched from the lips of a starving proletariat.”
In Service with a Smile, Uncle Fred says: “You know and I know that Dunstable is a man who sticks at nothing and would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel a starving orphan out of tuppence.”
Even dogs get in on the socialism act. Emily the Dog has the following to say (or bark) to Colonel Wyvern in Money for Nothing: “It’s people like you that cause all this modern unrest and industrial strife. I know your sort well. Robbers and oppressors.”
Uncle Fred denounces the aristocracy in Cocktail Time, albeit via a parody of Marxist rhetoric:
“Now listen, Bert. This ‘M’lord’ stuff. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about it. I’m a Lord, yes, no argument about that, but you don’t have to keep rubbing it in all the time. It’s no good kidding ourselves. We know what lords are. Anachronistic parasites on the body of the state, is the kindest thing you can say of them. Well, a sensitive man doesn’t like to be reminded every half second that he is one of the untouchables, liable at any moment to be strung up on a lamp post or to have his blood flowing in streams down Park Lane. Couldn’t you substitute something matier and less wounding to my feelings?”
Speaking of communism, this line in The Luck of the Bodkins (1935) suggests that Plum, like Bertie’s Uncle George, “may be psychic”: “He had been relieved when some fellow-travellers named Burgess, Bostock and Billington-Todd had insinuated themselves and their trunks between them, hiding her from his view.” If MI5 is still looking for additional members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, they might get on the trail of Bostock and Billington-Todd, whoever they might be.
In Bill the Conqueror, Plum also reveals a knowledge of spycraft, specifically of “dead drops”: “He passed several deserted nooks which might have been constructed by the London County Council with the sole purpose of acting as dumping grounds for the photographs.”
The More Things Change . . .
Such enthusiasms will no doubt be familiar to the modern reader. The desire to improve the world is evergreen. Lady Malverns still exist, just in new forms and with new causes. Debates about class and inequality are receiving renewed attention; rhetoric about the “deserving” poor has never abated, and even eugenics is experiencing a revival in certain corners of the internet.
By discussing these dynamics through a comedic lens, Plum is not denying the seriousness of it all. Instead, he provides a way to acknowledge politics while refusing to “feel like an egg-shell in a maelstrom” (“Honeysuckle Cottage”). He may have a reputation as an apolitical writer, but his head was not in the sand. He created worlds in which politics was ever present, but he refused to accept at face value the self-importance and pomposity of politicians, reformers, and other troublemakers. We should be grateful to Plum for mastering that rare, difficult art form – political humor.
“There you see two typical members of the class which has down-trodden the poor for centuries. Idlers! Non-producers! Look at the tall thin one with the face like a motor-mascot. Has he ever done an honest day’s work in his life? No! A prowler, a trifler, and a blood-sucker! And I bet he still owes his tailor for those trousers!”
He seemed to me to be verging on the personal, and I didn’t think a lot of it.
“Comrade Bingo” (1922)
