Right Ho, Jeeves
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4.2 • 24 Ratings
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Publisher Description
Right Ho, Jeeves is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, the second full-length novel featuring the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, after Thank You, Jeeves. It also features a host of other recurring Wodehouse characters, and is mostly set at Brinkley Court, the home of Bertie's Aunt Dahlia. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 5 October 1934 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 15 October 1934 by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, under the title Brinkley Manor. [1] Before being published as a book, it had been sold to the Saturday Evening Post, in which it appeared in serial form from 23 December 1933 to 27 January 1934, and in England in the Grand Magazine from April to September 1934. [2] Wodehouse had already started planning this sequel while working on Thank You, Jeeves.
Customer Reviews
What ho!
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881–1975) was a prolific English playwright and lyricist, novelist and humorist, who published more than 90 books, 40 plays, 200 hundred short stories and other writings during his lifetime.
Among PGW’s best known creations are bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his estimable valet Jeeves, who feature in 10 novels, of which this is the second, and over 30 short stories. The highly contrived plots centre on the trivial (by most people’s standards) concerns of the idle rich in post-World War One Britain.
Here, Bertie returns from summer in Cannes with a white dinner jacket that Jeeves disapproves of. His old school chum and newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle turns up in London hoping to woo Madeline Bassett. (Bertie refers to her as ‘the bassett.’) Bertie’s a tad dusty the morning after Pongo Twistleton’s birthday bash at the Drones — his club in Mayfair — when his aunt Dahlia summons him to her country home to hand out the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School, and help deal with his cousin Angela’s broken engagement.
What’s good about it? The language, the dialogue, the pace, and above all the humour. Everything, basically. It’s fair to say PGW recycled a lot of the jokes in the Wooster series, which doesn’t matter unless you’re reading them back to back and hardly matters even if you are. They all bear repeating. The influence he exerted, and continues to exert, on subsequent British humorists (Blackadder, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers etc) is obvious, e.g. The French Taunter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a direct steal from Anatole the chef’s monologue here.
Bottom line
Wodehouse aficionados rate this among the first examples of his craft. I have no reason to dispute that.