THIS SOLID PENGUIN volume from 1981 brings together The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), Very Good, Jeeves! (1930), and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), all from right in the sweet spot of the Jeeves novels. In the post-WW II Jeeves novels, the unreality and anachronism of Bertie-world is so pronounced that not even Jeeves quite redeems things. The Jeeves novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unreal and anachronistic enough, God knows--no shell-shocked WWI veterans, no General Strike, no Slump, no rise of fascism (though The Code of the Woosters has a telling satire on Oswald Mosley)--but Bertie Wooster's circumstances and problems do not seem quite as far-fetched in the interwar novels as they do in the postwar novels.
Summary is pointless--in each novel, the obtuse upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster blunders his way into some sticky mess from which he is extricated by the masterly intelligence and voluminous knowledge of his valet, Jeeves. Bertie, whose intelligence and knowledge are relatively circumscribed, nonetheless makes an excellent narrator, vivid and hilarious, with an unmistakable stylistic verve.
I found myself wondering whether anyone had thought to apply Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Bertie and Jeeves. It turns out at least one person has: Kirby Olson in "Bertie and Jeeves at the End of History: P. G. Wodehouse as Political Scientist," published in the journal Humor in 1996. Beneath the hilarity, Kirby writes in his abstract, "lurks a sustained political thinking which has surprising similarities with leftist social theory." Wodehouse does not get much credit as a member of the revolutionary literary vanguard, but it is high time he did. W
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