The perfect genius of P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘never-never land’

Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, ‘as if the Fall of Man had never happened’.

In a letter to some admirers, Wodehouse wrote:

The world I write about, always a small one – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie… would say – is now not even small, it is non-existent. It has gone with the wind… In a word, it has had it. But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival.

Of course, that revival never came, and Plum died aged 93, just six weeks after he was so belatedly knighted. 

Born in Guildford in 1881, the son of a Hong Kong magistrate, he was the scion of one of Britain’s oldest baronetcies and the Earldom of Kimberley (he was also a great-nephew of the great Victorian, Saint John Henry, Cardinal Newman).