WODEHOUSE, P.G. The Code of the Woosters.

Fascism and Family Drama

WODEHOUSE, P.G. The Code of the Woosters. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1938.

8vo. Publisher’s yellow cloth, lettered and decorated in green to upper board and spine, top-edge green, fore-edge untrimmed, illustrated dust-jacket by ‘Roese’ priced at $2.00 to front flap with the publisher’s codes (‘887–38’, ‘2620–37’, ‘593–38’) as called for by McIlvaine; pp. [6], 298; closed tear (c. 50 mm) to dust-jacket’s upper portion of spine fold, pushing to spine ends, some spotting to fore-edge; marks to front pastedown where a bookplate has been removed; very good.

First US edition in book form, first printing (published simultaneously with the UK edition) the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, widely regarded as one of Wodehouse’s finest novels.

A sequel to Right Ho, Jeeves, this comic misadventure introduces Sir Watkyn Bassett, owner of Totleigh Towers, and his formidable friend, Roderick Spode, the leader of the fascist Black Shorts. When Aunt Dahlia orders Bertie to steal an eighteenth-century silver cow-shaped creamer from Totleigh Towers, threatening to cut off his access to her chef’s cooking if he refuses, Bertie finds himself entangled in Gussie Fink-Nottle’s rocky engagement to Madeline Bassett, Spode’s political ambitions, and a succession of increasingly absurd complications.

The novel was first serialised in the US in The Saturday Evening Post from 16 July to 3 September 1938, with illustrations by Wallace Morgan. It was also serialised in the UK in The Daily Mail between 14 September and 6 October 1938. By the 1930s, Wodehouse had become one of the highest-earning authors in the world. The success of The Code of the Woosters and his other Jeeves and Wooster novels helped to establish his writing as a major commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, represented by his new literary agents A.P. Watt in the UK and Reynolds in the US. These novels helped to establish Wodehouse ‘not simply as a writer, but as an international brand’. (Ratcliffe, p. 225).

Mcllvaine A60a; see Ratcliffe ed., P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (2011).

SKU: 2126265