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Schoolboy Code. The imaginary Wodehouse world, set somewhere between 1915 and 1935—the author could not be more precise—never changed. Even the most careful critic would be hard put to tell whether a novel was written last year or 50 years earlier. Wodehouse's stable of characters had bits and pieces added to them, but they never really developed or, indeed, aged by much more than an hour. Even their names suggested a Merrie England that never was—Gussie Fink-Nottle, Galahad Threepwood, Boko Fittleworth. The ethic that pervaded all the books and novels was Wodehouse's own: the schoolboy's code carried on into adult life. Fun and pranks are virtually demanded, but one must never be disloyal or let the team down. Jeeves can be seen as the headmaster, stern, wise but always fair, while Bertie is the bubbling, bumbling fifth-former, the perpetual adolescent who finds the world too confusing but always gets by, if just barely.
At the beginning, anyway, Wodehouse knew about the world of butlers and country houses only secondhand. His father was a judge in Hong Kong, and Wodehouse and his three brothers spent their boyhoods with relatives in England. He went to Dulwich College, a good but not famous public school near London; he was all set to attend Oxford, when the Indian rupee, on which his father's pension was pegged, collapsed. Instead, he got a job at the London office of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Unhappy at the bank, he began writing. In 1902 he published his first novel (The Pothunters) and left banking to write a humor column for the now defunct London Globe. He also took his first trip to America—and began saving for his second.
Most of his readers assumed that Wodehouse lived in Mayfair, around the block from Bertie Wooster's Drones Club, or in Shropshire, near Blandings Castle. In fact, the most English of English writers lived most of his life in the U.S., which always had a romantic attraction for him. "America's never been a foreign country to me," he said not long ago. "It always seemed like my own country. I don't know why, but I'd much sooner live here than in England."
Big Break. The feeling of affection might well have been inspired, at least in part, by the fact that his big break as a writer came in America. In 1914 the Saturday Evening Post paid Wodehouse $3,500 for rights to one of his novels, the beginning of a long and profitable relationship. At the same time, Wodehouse began writing plays with Guy Bolton, who became his lifelong friend. Both men collaborated with Jerome Kern on a series of fabulously successful musicals in the teens and '20s, including Oh Lady, Lady and Sitting Pretty. Perhaps the Wodehouse words that most Americans know best—although few can identify him as the author—are the lyrics to the song Bill from Show Boat.