WODEHOUSE, P.G.; R. Noel POCOCK (illustrator). The Pothunters.

Wodehouse’s First Innings

WODEHOUSE, P.G.; R. Noel POCOCK (illustrator). The Pothunters. London: Adam & Charles Black. 1902.

8vo. Publisher’s blue cloth, lettered in silver to spine, with a silver illustration of the Loving Cup to upper board and spine, housed in a custom-made quarter blue morocco solander box; pp. 272, with ten black-and-white illustrated plates including a frontispiece by R. Noel Pocock; corners and extremities very lightly rubbed, spine ends lightly bumped, top-edge a little dusty; preliminaries and endpapers somewhat foxed, but the text remains without the heavy foxing common with this work, and has only some light and infrequent markings; a very good copy.

First edition in book form, first printing, with the binding in the first state, of Wodehouse’s debut novel and the first of his public-school stories.

Set at St Austin’s, a fictional English public school, the novel follows a group of boys attempting to recover two silver sporting cups stolen from their cricket pavilion. It was first serialised in Public School Magazine from January to March of 1902, with illustrations by R. Noel Pocock (1878–1949); ten of these were reproduced when the novel was published in book form on 18 September 1902.

Wodehouse dedicated The Pothunters to the sisters Joan (1888–1954), Effie (1889–1981), and Ernestine Bowes-Lyon (1891–1981), three older cousins of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Mother. He had first met around 1897 and came to know them well in London in 1902, becoming a regular visitor to their family home, ‘joining them for tea in the nursery and making up numbers when their mother was short of a spare man for dinner parties’ (Ratcliffe, p. 541). It was at Effie’s encouragement that Wodehouse decided to leave his job at the bank and pursue a career as a full-time writer.

McIlvaine A1a. See Ratcliffe ed., P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (2011).

SKU: 2126252