“Carry on, Jeeves” introduces the world’s most famous butler, including rare physical descriptions of Jeeves himself. Jeeves narrates one story, giving us insights into what goes on behind his inscrutable facade.
A great place to start with Jeeves and Wooster
Carry on, Jeeves is a great place to start for anyone exploring the works of PG Wodehouse. My 2010 Folio edition (pictured) has ten short stories. It starts with the excellent Jeeves Takes Charge. Other gems include The Artistic Career of Corky, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest and Fixing It for Freddie. Published in 1925, it is due an imminent centenary.
The content of the stories, arguably, matters less than how they are told. But many of the plots are delightful. Jeeves takes Charge, for example, revolves around the publication of Uncle Willoughby’s “Recollections of a Long Life”, described as follows:
- ‘It is full of stories about people one knows who are the essence of propriety today, but who seem to have behaved, when they were in London in the ‘eighties, in a manner that would not have been tolerated in the fo’c’sle of a whaler.’
The idea of imminent publication of an elderly gent’s memoirs causing consternation re-emerges in the splendid Blandings novel, Heavy Weather.
The cover of my Folio edition of “Carry on, Jeeves” (Illustration by Paul Cox ©)
Introducing Jeeves
Jeeves first appears in page 2 of Jeeves takes charge. Bertie Wooster has dismissed his previous valet, Meadowes, for stealing:
- I had found Meadowes… sneaking my silk socks, a thing no bloke of spirit could stick at any price.
This suggests a great pub quiz question: what was the name of Bertie’s previous valet?
The stories contain rare physical descriptions of Jeeves:
- A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.
- Jeeves smiled paternally. Or, rather, he had a kind of paternal muscular spasm about the mouth, which is the nearest he ever gets to smiling.
- For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.
- [Jeeves] has one of those soft, soothing voices that slide through the atmosphere like the note of a far-off sheep.
“Carry on, Jeeves”: how Jeeves moves
Carry on, Jeeves also gives us several splendid descriptions of Jeeves moving silently:
- I told [Jeeves] to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing Zephyr… This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.
- One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch him like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.
- There was Jeeves, standing behind me, full of zeal. In this matter of shimmering into rooms the man is rummy to a degree. You’re sitting in the old arm-chair thinking of this and that, and then suddenly you look up, and there he is. He moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly-fish.
- Jeeves flowed in with the tray, like some silent stream meandering over its mossy bed…
Fantastic stuff. I particularly like “he moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jellyfish”.
Jeeves goes to work
Jeeves at once goes to work on Bertie Wooster. He indicates that he is not too keen on Lady Florence Craye, Bertie’s latest fiancee. Nor does he like Bertie’s choice of suit:
- ‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said; ‘about that check suit.’ ‘Yes, sir?’ ‘Is it really a frost?’ ‘A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’ ‘But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.’ ‘Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.’
Jeeves and Wooster, from “Jeeves Takes Charge”
Nor does Jeeves approve of Bertie’s attempt at a moustache:
- I had decided – rightly or wrongly – to grow a moustache, and this had cut Jeeves to the quick… I had been living ever since in an atmosphere of bally disapproval till I was getting jolly well fed up with it.
Later, Jeeves reads Bertie’s article on “What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing”.
- I watched him narrowly as he read on and, as I was expecting, what you might call the love-light suddenly died out of his eyes. I braced myself for an unpleasant scene. ‘Come to the bit about soft silk shirts for evening wear?’ I asked carelessly. ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jeeves, in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.
“Carry on, Jeeves”: Jeeves narrates
Unusually, in the tenth story, “Bertie Changes His Mind”, Jeeves, rather than Bertie, narrates the story. It’s like Sherlock Holmes, rather than Watson, telling a tale. I have tried this in my own “Hotel Stories”. In one tale the murderous hotelier Ms N, rather than her faithful ally Tatiana, narrates the story. I’m not sure it works.
Jeeves on Bertie Wooster
In “Bertie Changes His Mind”, narration by Jeeves allows him to share some insights on Bertie:
- I am fond of Mr Wooster, and I admit I came very near to melting as I looked at his face. He was staring at me in a sort of dumb despair that would have touched anybody.
- Mr Wooster is a young gentleman with practically every desirable quality except one. I do not mean brains, for in an employer brains are not desirable. The quality to which I allude is hard to define, but perhaps I might call it the gift of dealing with the Unusual Situation. In the presence of the Unusual, Mr Wooster is too prone to smile weakly and allow his eyes to protrude. He lacks Presence. I have often wished that I had the power to bestow upon him some of the savoir-faire of a former employer of mine, Mr Montague-Todd, the well-known financier, now in the second year of his sentence.
- It was painful to see Mr Wooster’s brain endeavouring to work.
- Mr Wooster’s is not one of those inscrutable faces which is is impossible to read. On the contrary, it is a limpid pool in which is mirrored each passing emotion.
Other Jeeves wisdom
- Employers are like horses. They require managing. Some gentlemen’s personal gentlemen have the knack of managing them, some have not. I, I am happy to say, have no cause for complaint.
- I deprecate as vulgar and undignified the practice of listening at keyholes, but without lowering myself to that, I have generally contrived to find a way.
Can any Wodehouse experts tell me of other examples of Jeeves narrating? Do you think it works?
Bertie Wooster
Carry on, Jeeves includes a good many fine reflections about himself from Bertie Wooster:
- I’m all for rational enjoyment and so forth, but I think a chappie makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan.
- [How Bertie spends his days:] I went off to the club to sit in the window and watch the traffic coming up one way and going down the other. It was latish in the evening when I looked in at the flat to dress for dinner.
- [Bertie’s musings on the poor:] As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I’d always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! Of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves, and haven’t got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don’t you know. I mean to say, ever since then I’ve been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.
Some of Bertie’s friends, such as Charles Edward Biffen (“Biffy”) are even dimmer than he is:
- There in a nutshell you have Charles Edward Biffen. As vague and woollen-headed a blighter as ever bit a sandwich. Goodness knows – and my Aunt Agatha will bear me out in this – I’m no master mind myself; but compared with Biffy I’m one of the great thinkers of all time.
Bertie and “Biffy”, from “The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy”
“Carry on, Jeeves”: Bertie Wooster on women
Carry on, Jeeves is rich in accounts of Bertie’s views on relationships. Take these three:
Bertie’s attitude to engagement:
- I don’t know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marryng yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of – well, it’s difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the hungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a tree and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal’s slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity.
Bertie on clever, energetic women:
- Honoraria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to have to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover. The sort of girl who reduces you to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then comes down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting you to take an intelligent interest in Freud.
Bertie on relationships:
- ‘Change of scene is the thing. I heard of a man. Girl refused him. Man went abroad. Two months later girl wired him “Come back, Muriel.” Man started to write out a reply; suddenly found he couldn’t remember girl’s surname; so never answered at all, and lived happily ever after.‘
“Carry on, Jeeves”: a wealth of characters
Like many Jeeves and Wooster stories, Carry on, Jeeves is rich in delicious descriptions of minor characters. Here are a few gems:
Florence Craye
- A glance showed me that [Florence Craye] was perturbed and even peeved. her eyes had a goggly look, and altogether she appeared considerably pipped. ‘Darling!’ I said, and attempted the good old embrace; but she side-stepped like a bantam-weight.
Corky
- [Mr Worple’s] general tendency was to think that Corky was a poor chump and that whatever step he took in any direction on his own account was just another proof of his innate idiocy. I should imagine Jeeves feels very much the same about me.
Publishers
- I always used to think that publishers had to be devilish intelligent fellows, loaded down with the grey matter; but I’ve got their number now. All a publisher has to do is to write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.
“Carry on, Jeeves”: Lady Malvern
- [Lady Malvern] fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.
Miss Rockmetteller, “Rocky’s Aunt”
- [Rocky’s aunt] looked at me in rather a rummy way. It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.
- [Rocky’s aunt:] Somehow it was brought home to me that she didn’t like Englishmen, and that if she had had to meet an Englishman I was the one she’d have chosen last.
Sir Roderick Glossop, a famous psychiatrist
- If ever there was a bloke at the very mention of whose name it would be excusable for people to tremble like aspens, that bloke is Sir Roderick Glossop. He has an enormous bald head, all the hair which ought to be on it seeming to have run into his eyebrows, and his eyes go through you like a couple of Death Rays.
- [Sir Roderick Glossop] One of the things that get this old crumb so generally disliked among the better element of the community is the fact that he has a head like the dome of St Paul’s and eyebrows that want bobbing or shingling to reduce them to anything like reasonable size.
The Pringle Family
- Sippy had described [the Pringles] as England’s premier warts, and it looked to me as if he might be about right. Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs Pringle’s aspect was that one one who had had bad news around the year 1900 and never really got over it.
Bingo Little
- All the time young Bingo looked like an owl with a secret sorrow.
Anatole the Chef
- [An early reference to Anatole, the famous chef:] Somewhere or other some time ago Bingo’s missus managed to dig up a frenchman of the most extraordinary vim and skill. A most amazing Johnnie who dishes a wicked ragoût. Old Bingo has put on at least ten pounds in weight since this fellow Anatole arrived in the home.
“Carry on, Jeeves”: what to do next
I hope you’ve enjoyed these quotes from the outstanding “Carry On, Jeeves”. I thoroughly advise you to read it.
If you have enjoyed this piece, you can explore my other posts on PG Wodehouse.
You may also wish to try my comic “Hotel Stories”. You can read the first one, Britches, as an e-book for only 99p or 99c. The collection “Seven Hotel Stories“, available as e-book or paperback, has gone down well, too. Enjoy!
The best butler in the world?
If you would like to read about an actual butler who transformed my life – the great Antonio Navarro, butler at the British Embassy in Vienna from the 1980s until 2023, you may like to read my book Lessons in Diplomacy: Politics, Power and Parties. It’s designed as a readable account of what diplomats and ambassadors really do behind the scenes.
