A Celebration of

 

P G Wodehouse is widely regarded as the master of the English comic novel. Many writers — among them, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Hilaire Belloc, V S Pritchett, Tom Sharpe, Douglas Adams and Joe Keenan — have rated him as one of the finest English prose writers of the twentieth century.

I've been an admirer of Wodehouse's work for over 30 years and in these pages I hope to share some of my enthusiasm for his work.

Wodehouse's stories can be enjoyed just as they are, and many fans prefer it that way. But one of the characteristics of Wodehouse's style is the way in which he uses quotations — from the Bible, Shakespeare, the English classics, popular fiction, even from popular songs of his day — often mangling them in a manner that is uniquely his own. Only those who can recognise the very many allusions and quotations with which his work is packed can fully appreciate his comic talent.

For the modern reader, this presents a problem. Even readers who have had an English education are unlikely to share his cultural background. And for Wodehouse's many admirers in other countries, the difficulties must be even greater. This is a pity, because it means much of his humour passes unnoticed. With this in mind, a few years ago, some members of the Blandings group began a project to annotate the books, our aim being to identify and trace the sources of the many quotations and to explain some of the historical and other references; to date, about 20 books have been annotated.

While much of this work is only accessible to members of the Blandings group, I have created this site to give wider circulation to the annotations for which I have been responsible. I shall plan to broaden the scope of my work to include plot synopses, lists of characters, and profiles of the major characters.

What's available

• Information about individual books can be found via the links on the Books page.
• For profiles of major characters, start at the Characters page.
• There are also a few pages of general information:
  • A brief biography;
  • An annotated bibliography of books about Wodehouse; and
  • A glossary of golf terminology;
  • Links to other sites that I find useful.

Search the site

If you want to find something in particular, you can try searching the site. As the search engine returns only the first match on each page, you may need to search the pages for other occurrences of your search term.

Keeping up to date

I'd love to be able to work on this site full-time, but the real world keeps calling! For those who wish to stay abreast of the intermittent changes and additions, there's a What's New page; alternatively, if you use an RSS aggregator, you can subscribe to my webfeed.