Who's Who in Wodehouse
Second Revised Edition
The century's most prolific humorist in English and by any standard the most successful, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse wrote 291 stories and 73 novels between 1901 and his death in 1975. He has peopled the imagination of our age with characters whose fame reaches even beyond his large circle of readers: Jeeves, the omniscient manservant; Bertie Wooster, his cloth-headed employer; Bertie's formidable aunts, the genial but amoral Dahlia and the featful Agatha; Lord Emsworth, the dreamy master of Blandings Castle, and the Empress of Blandings, his prize Berkshire sow.
"English literature's performing flea" (as Sean O'Casey once dismissed him) was not only one of its greatest stylists: he was also a brilliant creator of personages around whom constellations of fiction grew up. Of his over 2300 characters, about one in seven appears in more than one title, making a guide to his characters an essential vademecum for anyone with more than a passing interest in Wodehouse's world.
Who's Who in Wodehouse accounts for every character who enters Wodehouse's fiction and speaks lines. It also identifies dozens of manservants, butlers, chambermaids, and others in service whose calling requires reticence, assorted cats and dogs whose marked personalities transcend speech, a moustache named Joyeuse which takes on a life of its own, and a similarly named bath sponge.
Because it uses Wodehouse's own words to describe his characters, Who's Who in Wodehouse is entertaining to read in its own right, providing a quick appreciation of such extraordinary families as the far-flung Mulliners, the kith and kin of Lord Emsworth (the Threepwood clan), and Bertie Wooster's tribe. Peter van Straaten's brilliant line drawings of the pick of Plum's personae add to the entertainment as they deftly capture the essence of their subjects.
The only comprehensive account of Wodehouse characters, Who's Who in Wodehouse includes all the early fiction, much of which is still unreprinted. There is a useful alphabetical list of all Wodehouse titles and collections, with a separate bibliography of the little-known uncollected fiction.