Wednesday, November 9, 2022

P Smith in the City - P G Woodhouse - 288 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

P G Woodhouse


Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea," and he was embroiled in a war controversy but Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was meant to be a famous comic writer who would forever change the butler image with his Jeeves character. A writing career of more than 70 years, Wodehouse’s writing scenes were of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youth in an untouched Britain.


Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies.


Though Wodehouse is known worldwide for the legendary character Jeeves, he wasn't the first creation of the famed English author. It was Psmith. The Psmith stories were about an ingenious jack-of-all-trades with a charming, exaggeratedly refined English manner. A member of the Drones Club, this monocle-sporting Old Etonian is something of a dandy, a fluent and witty speaker, and has a remarkable ability to pass through the most amazing adventures unruffled. (Wodehouse Wiki )



Wodehouse said that he based P Smith on Rupert D'Oyly Carte (1876–1948), the son of the Gilbert and Sullivan impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, as he put it "the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it".


Psmith appears in four novel-length works, all of which appeared as magazine serials before being published in book form. Psmith in the City is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published on 23 September 1910 by Adam & Charles Black, London. The story was originally released as a serial in The Captain magazine, between October 1908 and March 1909, under the title The New Fold.


It continues the adventures of cricket-loving Mike Jackson and his immaculately-dressed friend Psmith, first encountered in Mike (1909).




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