The Code of the Woosters is also where you’ll find some of Wodehouse’s most quoted lines: The continued popularity of this story almost 80 years after its original publication, and its inclusion by literary list-makers as exemplifying Wodehouse at his best, assures this novel’s place as a 20th Century Classic. Since 2013, it has been going about on the stage under a false name – as Perfect Nonsense – with great success. The Code of the Woosters has been adapted multiple times for television and radio.

One devotee, Mr Ashok Bhatia, has gone a step further in trying to de-codify the Code of the Woosters. Wodehouse societies where similarly afflicted subjects gather in gangs and kid ourselves that such behaviour is normal. Once the enthusiast reaches this stage, it is advisable to join one of the excellent P.G. In serious cases, fans have been known to collect them, to display proudly on the mantelpiece abaft their statue of the Infant Samuel at Prayer. Perfectly sensible people who previously had no earthly use for cow creamers, find themselves squealing with delight when they meet one. (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow creamer, and the small brown leather-covered notebook.īertie is propelled to Totleigh Towers, lair of Sir Watkyn Bassett and his soupy daughter Madeline, where he must wade knee-deep in a stew of Aunts, amateur dictators, policemen’s helmets and silver cow-creamers –to say nothing of the dog Bartholomew.Īmong Wodehouse enthusiasts, devotion to The Code of the Woosters borders on the cultish. I allude to the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev. Little knowing, as I crossed that threshold, that in about two shakes of a duck’s tail I was to become involved in an imbroglio that would test the Wooster soul as it had seldom been tested before. Bertie’s respite is curtailed by a visit to his Aunt Dahlia. The story opens with Bertie sipping one of Jeeves’ famous hangover cures, the morning after a binge honouring Gussie Fink-Nottle. Its plot and characters are arguably Wodehouse’s best known. The Code of the Woosters frequently pops up in literary lists of ‘books you must read’.

A classic it most certainly is, not just in the eyes of Wodehouse readers. Wodehouse in your 2016 Reading Challenge – as a 20th Century Classic. The Code of the Woosters was one of Stefan Nilsson’s suggestions for including a book by P.G.

Wodehouse code of the woosters