P. G. Wodehouse 1881–1975

Abstract

Sir Pelham Grenville ‘Plum’ Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) was born in Guildford and educated at Dulwich College. He worked for two years in a London bank but left in 1903 to write for a living. In his school-stories for the boys’ magazine The Captain he began to create the idealised comic world he was later to evolve in the course of dozens of novels and books of stories. Jeeves, the perfect manservant, his ‘mentally negligible’ employer Bertie Wooster and, in another series of books, the absent-minded Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle, head Wodehouse’s huge cast of vivid, lovable figures of farce. T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh were among the earliest critical admirers of his skills as a stylist. Wodehouse emigrated to America in 1909 and spent most of the rest of his life there. He was knighted just before his death.