Novel
The Code of the Woosters
P. G. Wodehouse · 1938
Synopsis
Aunt Dahlia sends Bertie Wooster to disparage, at a London antique dealer's, an eighteenth-century silver cow creamer coveted by her husband, Uncle Tom. The object goes to another collector, Sir Watkyn Bassett, and Bertie is ordered to go and take it back at Totleigh Towers, his country house. There he finds Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts; his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, on bad terms with his fiancée Madeline Bassett; Stiffy Byng, her cousin, who has designs of her own; and a notebook that Gussie should never have lost.
Context
The novel appeared on 7 October 1938, on the same day in London and New York, after serialisation in an American weekly, and it picks up the thread of a novel of 1934 in which Gussie and Madeline already appeared. Roderick Spode is a satire of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists: his followers wear black shorts, because, says one character, there were no shirts left to be had. Bertie tells him that he is taken for an ass who parades about in footer bags.
Who it is for
About three hundred pages; translated into French as early as 1954 under a different title, then reissued in 1982 under the current title.
Prizes and reception
The only novel by its author selected in 2015 by the critics consulted by the BBC among the hundred greatest British novels, at number one hundred.
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The pages consulted to check this page.