Editing P. G. Wodehouse (section)

==Reception and reputation==
===Literary reception===
Wodehouse's early career as a lyricist and playwright was profitable, and his work with Bolton, according to ''The Guardian'', "was one of the most successful in the history of musical comedy".<ref>"PG Wodehouse dies aged 93", ''The Guardian'', 17 February 1975, p. 7</ref> At the outbreak of the Second World War he was earning £40,000 a year from his work, which had broadened to include novels and short stories.<ref name="Guardian: Barker" /> Following the furore ensuing from the wartime broadcasts, he suffered a downturn in his popularity and book sales; ''The Saturday Evening Post'' stopped publishing his short stories, a stance they reversed in 1965, although his popularity—and the sales figures—slowly recovered over time.<ref>White, p. 289</ref>

[[File:A Prefect's Uncle 1903.jpg|thumb|alt=book cover illustration showing luggage, an adult, and a boy, the latter in old-fashioned school uniform|Cover of Wodehouse's 1903 novel ''[[A Prefect's Uncle]]'']]
Wodehouse received great praise from many of his contemporaries, including Max Beerbohm, Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman<ref name=dnb /> and Evelyn Waugh—the last of whom opines, "One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page."<ref>Wodehouse and Ratcliffe, p. 27</ref> There are dissenters to the praise. The writer [[Alan Bennett]] thinks that "inspired though his language is, I can never take more than ten pages of the novels at a time, their relentless flippancy wearing and tedious",<ref>Bennett, p. 356</ref> while the literary critic [[Q. D. Leavis]] writes that Wodehouse had a "stereotyped humour&nbsp;... of ingenious variations on a laugh in one place".<ref>Leavis, p. 263</ref> In a 2010 study of Wodehouse's few relatively serious novels, such as ''The Coming of Bill'' (1919), ''Jill the Reckless'' (1920) and ''The Adventures of Sally'' (1922), David Heddendorf concludes that though their literary quality does not match that of the farcical novels, they show a range of empathy and interests that in real life—and in his most comic works—the author seemed to lack. "Never oblivious to grief and despair, he opts in clear-eyed awareness for his timeless world of spats and woolly-headed peers. It's an austere, almost bloodless preference for pristine artifice over the pain and messy outcomes of actual existence, but it's a case of Wodehouse keeping faith with his own unique art."<ref>Heddendorf, David. [https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sewanee_review/v118/118.3.heddendorf01.html "When Plummie Met Sally—The Other P. G. Wodehouse"], ''Sewanee Review'', Vol. 118, No. 3, Summer 2010, pp. 411–416, [[Project MUSE]]. {{subscription required}}</ref>

The American literary analyst Robert F. Kiernan, defining "camp" as "excessive stylization of whatever kind", brackets Wodehouse as "a master of the camp novel", along with [[Thomas Love Peacock]], [[Max Beerbohm]], [[Ronald Firbank]], [[E. F. Benson]] and [[Ivy Compton-Burnett]].<ref>Leonardi, Susan J. [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v037/37.2.leonardi.html "Frivolity Unbound"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150613020126/http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v037/37.2.leonardi.html |date=13 June 2015 }}, ''MFS Modern Fiction Studies'', Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 1991, pp. 356–357, [[Project MUSE]] {{subscription required}}</ref> The literary critic and writer [[Cyril Connolly]] calls Wodehouse a "politicians' author"—one who does "not like art to be exacting and difficult".<ref name="CONNOLLY99">Connolly, p. 99</ref>{{refn|Alongside Wodehouse, Connolly listed [[light music]], [[Mickey Mouse]], the ''[[Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse|Oxford Book of Verse]]'' and the works of [[Edgar Wallace]] and [[Mary Webb]].<ref name="CONNOLLY99"/>|group= n}} Two former British prime ministers, [[H. H. Asquith]] and [[Tony Blair]], are on record as Wodehouse aficionados, and the latter became a patron of the Wodehouse Society.<ref name=dnbarchive /> [[Seán O'Casey]], a successful playwright of the 1920s, thought little of Wodehouse; he commented in 1941 that it was damaging to England's dignity that the public or "the academic government of Oxford, dead from the chin up" considered Wodehouse an important figure in English literature.<ref name=casey>O'Casey, Sean, ''quoted''  in [http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8190907 "Sean O'Casey caustic on Wodehouse"], ''[[The Argus (Melbourne)|The Argus]]'', Melbourne, 9 July 1941, p. 1</ref> His jibe that Wodehouse was "English literature's performing flea" provided his target with the title of his collected letters, published in 1953.<ref name=casey/> McCrum, writing in 2004, observes, "Wodehouse is more popular today than on the day he died", and "his comic vision has an absolutely secure place in the English literary imagination".<ref>McCrum, p. 417</ref>

===Honours and influence===

The proposed nominations of Wodehouse for a [[knighthood]] in 1967 and 1971 were blocked for fear that such an award would "revive the controversy of his wartime behaviour and give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character which the embassy was doing its best to eradicate".<ref name=block/> When Wodehouse was awarded the knighthood, only four years later, the journalist [[Dennis Barker]] wrote in ''The Guardian'' that the writer was "the solitary surviving English literary comic genius".<ref name="Guardian: Barker">"A funny thing happened on the way&nbsp;...: Dennis Barker on the official rehabilitation of P. G. Wodehouse", ''The Guardian'', 2 January 1975, p. 11</ref> After his death six weeks later, the journalist [[Michael Davie]], writing in the same paper, observed that "Many people regarded&nbsp;... [Wodehouse] as he regarded [[Beachcomber (pen name)|Beachcomber]], as 'one, if not more than one, of England's greatest men{{'"}},<ref>"Wodehouse—the man who wrote musical comedy without music", ''The Observer'', 16 February 1975, p. 3</ref> while in the view of the obituarist for ''The Times'' Wodehouse "was a comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce".<ref>"P. G. Wodehouse", ''The Times'', 17 February 1975, p. 14</ref> In September 2019 Wodehouse was commemorated with a memorial stone in [[Westminster Abbey]];<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.ft.com/content/3280beb6-db02-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17 |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221210/https://www.ft.com/content/3280beb6-db02-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17 |archive-date=10 December 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |title=PG Wodehouse commemorated with Westminster Abbey plaque |website= Financial Times|date= 20 September 2019 |access-date=22 September 2019}}</ref> the dedication was held two days after it was installed.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-news/pg-wodehouse |title=Westminster Abbey Honours P G Wodehouse |website= Westminster Abbey |date= 20 September 2019 |access-date=22 September 2019}}</ref>

Since Wodehouse's death there have been numerous adaptations and dramatisations of his work on television and film;<ref name=dnb /><ref>Connolly, p. 117</ref> Wodehouse himself has been portrayed on radio and screen numerous times.{{refn|On screen he has been played by [[Peter Woodward]] in ''Wodehouse on Broadway'' (BBC, 1989);<ref>{{cite book|last=Taves|first=Brian|title=P. G. Wodehouse and Hollywood: Screenwriting, Satires and Adaptations|publisher=McFarland & Company|date=2006|location=London|isbn=978-0-7864-2288-3|page=8}}</ref> and [[Tim Pigott-Smith]] in ''Wodehouse in Exile'' (BBC, 2013).<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rlwy8 |title=Wodehouse in Exile |website=BBC Four |publisher=BBC |access-date=1 August 2020}}</ref> On radio he has been played by [[Benjamin Whitrow]] (BBC, 1999);<ref>{{cite web|url=https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e3f01477fc6449ae9b91d2310bf40fca |website=BBC Genome: Radio Times |publisher=BBC |title=Afternoon Play: Plum's War |date=7 July 1999 |access-date=1 August 2020}}</ref> and twice by [[Tim McInnerny]] (BBC, 2008<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fz12l |website=BBC Radio 4 |title=Tony Staveacre – Wodehouse in Hollywood |access-date=1 August 2020}}</ref> and 2010).<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wlf5m |website=BBC Radio 4 |title=How To Be An Internee With No Previous Experience |access-date=1 August 2020}}</ref>|group= n}} There are several literary societies dedicated to Wodehouse. The P. G. Wodehouse Society (UK) was founded in 1997 and has over 1,000 members as at 2015.<ref name=Murphy183>Murphy, pp. 183–185</ref> [[Alexander Armstrong]] became president of the society in 2017;<ref>[https://www.pgwodehousesociety.org.uk/ "Our President"], P. G. Wodehouse Society. Retrieved 3 September 2024</ref> past presidents have included [[Terry Wogan]] and [[Richard Briers]].<ref>[https://www.pgwodehousesociety.org.uk/president "What ho, Mr President!"], P. G. Wodehouse Society. Retrieved 3 September 2024</ref> There are also groups of Wodehouse fans in Australia, Belgium, France, Finland, India, Italy, Russia, Sweden and the US.<ref name=Murphy183/> As at 2015 the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' contains over 1,750 quotations from Wodehouse, illustrating terms from ''crispish'' to ''zippiness''.<ref>McCrum, Robert. [http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/shapers-of-english/pg-wodehouse-in-the-oed/ "P. G. Wodehouse in the OED"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150707204810/http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/shapers-of-english/pg-wodehouse-in-the-oed/ |date=7 July 2015 }}, Oxford University Press, retrieved 2 June 2015</ref> Voorhees, while acknowledging that Wodehouse's antecedents in literature range from [[Ben Jonson]] to [[Oscar Wilde]], writes:

{{Blockquote|[I]t is now abundantly clear that Wodehouse is one of the funniest and most productive men who ever wrote in English. He is far from being a mere jokesmith: he is an authentic craftsman, a wit and humorist of the first water, the inventor of a prose style which is a kind of comic poetry.<ref>Voorhees (1985), pp. 341–342</ref>|}}