Stay Classy, pt. 1

Perhaps the one element of Wodehouse’s work that makes it feel unreal is that a majority of the stories involve the British (mostly English) upper classes.  Few readers, whether contemporaries to the publication dates or modern, are a part of that very small gentrified class.  The concept of not having to work because one’s life is supported by an enormous trust or family inheritance is alien to a greater part of the world.  Yet, it is something that I would argue that everyone has dreamed about at least once in their life, if not on a daily basis, especially, oh say, the day that the mortgage is due. 

By giving his main characters freedom from work, it opens up their time to other pursuits.  Even if they have no formal occupation, there is always the family land to maintain, or, in the case of one Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, the need to cut a dash about town and appease his tribe of aunts.  Not having formal occupations allows for some of the action of the most screwball plots, because who has time to plot the purloining of a silver cow-shaped creamer if your nine to five is spent pushing papers?

Of course, reflecting the concerns of the late twenties and early thirties (and our own times), a good many plots are involved with members of the upper classes losing their money and being forced into reduced circumstances, dreaming of retaining their faded glory.  This is a central plot point in Sam the Sudden, where our heroine becomes impoverished following the death of her parents.  In the end, she meets a man who is fabulously wealthy and all is right once more.  The feeling is that the upper classes ought to stay there, in a fixed orbit.  This holds true even for the gentry who have been improvised by the inheritance taxes that were introduced in the early part of the twentieth century.  While they might be forced to lease their grand estates, the notion that they ought to seek gainful employment simply does not occur to them.  They sit there, in moldering houses with closed wings, and the impression given is that this is what they should be doing.

This is not to say that the Wodehouse’s upper classes are sealed off from the rest of the country.  Part of the spark behind the action is the interplay between the working, or criminal, classes and the toffs.  One need only look at the dependence of Wooster on Jeeves to know that Wodehouse did not think that one’s birth automatically made one a superior human being.  Jeeves is most certainly from working-class origins, yet his brain is truly first-rate.  The class system well and truly exists in Wodehouse, but he most certainly does not worship it. 

More on the class system in part two.