We all know that Wodehouse knew nothing about politics. He had no partisan allegiances. He held no political opinions. We search his books in vain for political lessons. He escaped from such unpleasantness into his literary worlds, where the shenanigans of politicians and parties do not intrude.
This is the conventional wisdom, and his readers would not have it any other way. In this essay, I will reconsider this perspective in light of Wodehouse’s fictional references to the political parties of his day. The meaning of these mentions is not always clear, as the political context of Victorian and Edwardian Britain has receded into the mists of time. We are also tempted to glide over them, as our focus is on his clever language, historic settings, and unique characters.
As a political scientist reading his work, I could not help but notice that references to the parties are casually but regularly interspersed. It is easy to miss as we are charmed by the deceptive ease of his writing and the seemingly effortless humor on every page. Wodehouse is now recognized as England’s greatest comic writer, and his new memorial at Westminster Abbey reads “Humourist, Novelist, Playwright, Lyricist”—not “Pundit.” As I will show, this does not mean he was unaware of the political parties, or that they played no role in his stories.
Even if the party system makes a regular appearance in his writing, did Wodehouse express any opinions? We may not find any overt endorsement of parties or ideologies, but a curious pattern emerges. As I will discuss, Wodehouse gratuitously criticizes one side of the political spectrum across multiple decades: the Conservatives. This may not quite constitute a sustained attack, but for a writer with a reputation for no interest in politics, it is remarkable.
Wodehouse and The Globe
While Plum hoped to attend Oriel College at Oxford, his plans were derailed by a rupee devaluation. His father’s disposable income was reduced, and he decided that one son at the ’Varsity was enough. Rather than matriculate at Oxford, Plum reluctantly entered the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in 1900. This was a rather depressing time in his life, as we know from the thinly fictionalized Psmith in the City. Is there any more spirit-crushing scene in the Wodehouse canon than Mike’s search for furnished lodgings in Dulwich?
But Wodehouse did not resign himself to that fate. Norman Murphy (A Wodehouse Handbook) observed that Wodehouse began “writing for his life—the life he wanted to lead.” It was a race against time. He knew that new bank employees received an overseas posting after two years in London; exile would dash his literary dreams. His big break came when a former Dulwich master, William Beach Thomas, offered him a temporary job on the Globe. Plum’s work was already starting to appear in print, so he took a risk and quit his bank job, eventually receiving Thomas’s position.
He worked on the By the Way column, which appeared on the front page and included political commentary. The Globe was a paper with definite partisan views, and Wodehouse had to support the party line. According to Murphy, “The column normally began with some satirical comment on speeches made by Liberal politicians (the Globe was a Conservative paper).”
Wodehouse would therefore “read the newspapers of the day before, see what was ‘in the news’—and write a funny column about it by twelve noon.” As he looked for ammunition to criticize the Liberals, he learned about late Victorian and Edwardian politics. This knowledge eventually found its way into his stories, as did many items from his real life.
Nevertheless, he almost certainly disliked writing partisan twaddle, and he got a lighthearted revenge by criticizing in his subsequent fiction the Tories and Unionists he had been required to support.
The Party Context
A brief but hopelessly inadequate overview of the political parties in Wodehouse’s time might be in order.
During the years when Wodehouse lived in England, the state of party politics was in unusual flux. One party, the Conservatives, was also known as the Tories. Another had taken shape by the mid-nineteenth century (the Liberal Party), and a third was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Labour). In addition, a party alliance developed in the late nineteenth century that was not technically a party but was treated in everyday commentary as one: the Unionists. Also, Ireland sent dozens of representatives to Parliament until the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922.
In the early and mid-nineteenth century, parties were not the same creatures as those of today. They were more like factions within the upper class, often based around political personalities and without any of the organizational structure we know today. After an election, the meaning of the results was not necessarily clear until the winners showed up at Parliament and the factional balance of power became more evident.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the parties would become the organized and institutionalized entities we know today. This development was accelerated by the 1872 Reform Act, which expanded the electorate to such a degree that the parties needed better organization in order to mobilize potential voters.
The Liberals favored free trade, expansion of voting rights, parliamentary reform, and social reform. They coalesced around several factions: Whigs, Radicals, and free-trade Tories (Peelites). They would become associated in the public mind with industrial cities like Manchester, but its MPs (Members of Parliament) were from the aristocracy as well as from the new class of manufacturers and merchants. It also found supporters among religious dissenters and in the territory called the “Celtic fringe.”
The Tories were almost a time-immemorial faction; the name “Conservative” was a later and more official label. They were instinctively against change and supported the pillars of traditional England: the landed gentry, the Church of England, and the monarchy. The heart of the party was in the shires and southeast England. During the nineteenth century, the party would become less reactionary and more willing to support gradual change, a position associated with the philosophy of Edmund Burke.
Victorian politics were characterized by a clash of the titans, the epic battle between Liberal William Gladstone and Tory Benjamin Disraeli. Competing for power over several decades, control of Parliament would flip between these two extraordinary and very different characters. While the Liberal Party was the dominant force by mid-century, it would eventually become a victim of its own success. As free-trade doctrine and the entrepreneurial spirit became adopted across the British ruling classes, it lost its previous distinctiveness and became associated more with social reform, thereby losing much of its business support. In addition, Disraeli had no problem pinching Liberal ideas in order to win elections, so ideological lines could be fuzzy.
The Labour Party grew from labor union and socialist movements, and it benefited from the gradual enfranchisement of the working classes. It operated initially through electoral agreements with the Liberal Party but became an independent party by the twentieth century. It eventually displaced the Liberals, but that came after Wodehouse’s early life in London. The first Labour Prime Minister took office in 1924.
The Unionists came about because of Britain’s troubled relationship with Ireland. They represented a partisan alliance between the Liberal Unionist Party (1886 to 1912) and the Conservative Party. The Liberal Unionists consisted of former Liberal Party politicians, largely Whig aristocrats but also some Radicals, who broke away over the issue of Irish Home Rule, which they strongly opposed. They did not necessarily agree with the Conservatives on other issues, and many continued to share the policy views of their erstwhile colleagues in the Liberal Party.
The Conservatives and the Liberal Unionist Party ultimately merged in 1912 to form what is still officially called the Conservative and Unionist Party. Before the merger, this party alliance was commonly referred to as the Unionists.
A well-known Liberal Unionist was Wodehouse’s friend and cricket teammate Arthur Conan Doyle. He twice ran for Parliament under its banner, albeit unsuccessfully, because of the Irish Home Rule question. Conan Doyle wrote in his Memories and Adventures, “I was what was called a Liberal-Unionist, that is, a man whose general position was Liberal, but who could not see his way to support Gladstone’s Irish Policy. Perhaps we were wrong. However, that was my view at the time.”
According to Wesley Ferris, “Candidates came to be identified in the press as ‘Unionists’ alone” and “many modern sources simply conflate the Liberal Unionists and Conservatives when it comes to electoral statistics.” When Wodehouse uses the word “Unionist,” he is therefore using a standard but vague journalistic term of the day, which undoubtedly followed from his work on a newspaper.
By the time Wodehouse reached adulthood, Ireland was sending 103 members to the House of Commons. In the 1900 parliamentary elections, the pro-independence Irish Parliamentary Party won the large majority, followed by the anti-Home Rule Irish Unionist Party (eighteen members, all from Ulster). This large grouping of Irish parliamentarians, primarily focused on Home Rule (Irish independence), created challenging dynamics for the two main parties in the House of Commons. They held the balance of parliamentary power when neither the Tories nor the Liberals held a majority. For instance, Irish M.P.s were responsible for the collapse of Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government in 1886 after Gladstone announced his support for Home Rule.
Unionists and Conservatives
We meet multiple Unionist and Conservative political candidates and politicians in Wodehouse stories, and almost all are unpleasant people. They could have been identified by Wodehouse as members of any party, or no party, so these attributions are notable and potentially meaningful.
In Psmith in the City (1910), we encounter Mr. Bickersdyke, an altogether unsympathetic character who is a Unionist candidate for Parliament. Psmith denounces him as “a bargee of the most pronounced type” while Mr. Waller more discreetly describes him as “not popular in the office. A little inclined, perhaps, to be hard on mistakes.”
We also learn that he had previously run for office as a Radical, an effort which he hopes is long forgotten. But Psmith discovers it, and when Mike and Psmith read his prior speeches, they note that he “lets himself go a bit” and is “simply cursing the Government” and calls the royal family “blood suckers.”
Now that he has moved up in the world, he has thrown overboard his youthful ideals and is running as a Unionist, and a nativist and jingoist to boot. He says “some nasty things about Free Trade and the Alien Immigrant,” and because Liberalism was closely associated with free trade, he is therefore more likely a Conservative than a Liberal Unionist.
Benny Green calls Bickersdyke “not just a Tory, not just a Tory apostate, but something much nastier, a Tory apostate who has arrived at his position through worldly advancement” and abandoned his youthful ideals. This may be a trifle harsh, as our hero Psmith does acknowledge that a person with more taxable income may be forgiven for supporting the party that promises to soften the bite. It is called voting for your interests, something the working class at the time was trying hard to be allowed to do.
[Incidentally, Mr. Bickersdyke has the distinction of being the great-great-grandfather of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. In the Madame Eulalie online annotations of the Wodehouse canon, we read that “Bickersdyke must be modelled on Sir Ewen Cameron, manager of the London Branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank when Wodehouse worked there.” Norman Murphy noted that “Ewen’s great-great-grandson is also a senior Conservative; he is David Cameron, MP.”]
In Summer Lightning (1929), Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe is described as “on the eve of being accepted by the local Unionist Committee as their accredited candidate for the forthcoming by-election in the Bridgeford and Shifley Parliamentary Division of Shropshire.” This is the neighbor who lured away the Earl of Emsworth’s stellar pig man and is suspected by the earl of plotting to nobble Empress of Blandings.
In Heavy Weather (1933), Sir Gregory is still hoping to be the Unionists’ nominee for that same by-election. He fears the publication of the Hon. Galahad’s scandalous reminiscences because “no one knew better than himself that Unionist committees look askance at men with pasts.” He also plots with Lady Constance to steal and destroy the manuscript.
We see an oblique reference to the parties in “The Long Arm of Looney Coote” (1923), when Ukridge takes it upon himself to help old school friend “Boko” Lawlor in his run for Parliament. While we do not know the partisan order of battle, various clues suggest that this friend is the Liberal Party candidate while his opponent is the Conservative candidate. This campaign also corresponds to the real-life parliamentary elections of 1922 and 1923.
In “Jeeves and the Impending Doom,” we meet another unlikable character who must be a Conservative. The Right Honourable A. B. Filmer is a cabinet minister who is a guest of Aunt Agatha at her country house. We later learn that she is trying to induce this politician to ask Bertie to be his private secretary, but with the help of a revenge-minded boy and an enraged swan, Bertie manages to avoid the trap.
The minister is described thusly by Aunt Agatha: “Mr. Filmer is a serious-minded man of high character and purpose, and you are just the type of vapid and frivolous wastrel against which he is most likely to be prejudiced.” And the following exchange takes place between Aunt Agatha and Bertie:
“In the first place, you will give up smoking during your visit.”
“Oh, I say!”
“Mr. Filmer is president of the Anti-Tobacco League. Nor will you drink alcoholic stimulants.”
“Oh, dash it!”
“And you will kindly exclude from your conversation all that is suggestive of the bar, the billiard-room, and the stage-door.”
Bertie later refers to him as a “superfatted bore.”
As the story was published in 1926, this rather stiff killjoy must have been a Conservative M.P. and member of Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet.
By the 1950s, Wodehouse was referring specifically to the Conservative Party. I am not the first to observe that this is a little late, historically speaking, as the Conservative/Unionist merger took place in 1912, but it does speak to his fundamental lack of interest in politics.
In Cocktail Time (1958), Sir Raymond Bastable is expecting to run as a Conservative Party candidate in an anticipated by-election. Uncle Fred refers to him as a “stinker,” an “overbearing dishpot,” and “pompous, arrogant, and far too pleased with himself”—and therefore knocks off his hat with a Brazil nut fired from a slingshot. Sir Raymond is at first deterred from identifying and revenging himself upon the miscreant because he is worried that the voters will lose confidence in a man who gets his topper knocked off. He also decides not to publish his subsequent novel of reckless youth, Cocktail Time, under his own name because “a man who is hoping for the Conservative nomination at Bottleton East has to be cautious.”
Does anyone actually like the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn? Maybe the Conservative Party does. Also known as “Aubrey Gawd-help-us Upjohn,” he once administered “six of the juiciest on the old spot with a cane” to Bertie. In Jeeves in the Offing (1960), we learn that “the hot tip is that the boys in the back room are going to run him as the Conservative candidate in the Market Snodsbury division at the next by-election.” Again, when Wodehouse gives a disliked character a party identification—and few characters could be more disliked than the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn—he chooses the Tories.
We see the Conservatives getting it right in the neck in one of his last novels. In Much Obliged, Jeeves, published in 1971 when Wodehouse was ninety, the plot involves a parliamentary by-election. The Conservative candidate is a Drones Club type, Ginger Winship, who is more concerned with changing fiancées than being elected to the mother of parliaments. When a former butler attempts to blackmail him, Ginger tries to get the local newspaper to print the charges in order to sabotage his own campaign.
More importantly, Wodehouse has Roderick Spode, the thinly veiled Oswald Mosley, giving speeches on Ginger’s behalf. Spode is now Lord Sidcup of the House of Lords, and clearly on the Tory bench. Wodehouse therefore ties the former fascist leader to the Conservative Party, a remarkable plot point that is easy for readers to ignore if they are focusing on the human relations rather than the politics.
In The White Feather (1907), we find a rare positive portrayal of a Conservative. In this early story, Sir William Bruce is not an important character, but his parliamentary by-election campaign is the excuse for the fight that the hero evades. He is described as follows: “The Conservative candidate, Sir William Bruce, was one of themselves—an Old Wrykynian, a governor of the school, a man who always watched school-matches, and the donor of the Bruce Challenge Cup for the school mile. In fine, one of the best.” A cynic might note that Wodehouse was still working for the Globe when the story was published, so perhaps he knew on which side his bread was buttered
What About the Senior Conservative Club?
One might point out that the Earl of Emsworth was a member of the Senior Conservative Club (as were four other members of the canon). This is a lightly disguised Constitutional Club, which was affiliated with the Conservative Party. As Norman Murphy noted, it was one of the six London clubs to which Wodehouse belonged at some point, and he was a member there for quite a bit more time than anywhere else, possibly joining as early as 1903/4. Does this membership suggest he had some sympathy with the Conservatives after all?
To answer this, we need to know why Wodehouse joined. He may have liked the food and anonymity, which is consistent with the club’s description in Leave It to Psmith (1923), but he may have initially joined two decades earlier for reasons of career expediency. As noted above, Wodehouse’s first real writing job started when he left the bank to accept a temporary position on the By the Way column of the Globe, a newspaper that supported the Tories.
Maybe Wodehouse joined the club in the year after he started writing the column because it was the least political way to signal an affiliation with the Conservative Party. The newspaper may not have wanted him to run for Parliament as a Tory, but it might have been reassured by some indication that he was part of the Conservative world.
We might not therefore interpret his membership, and the club’s appearance in his fiction, as indicative of his political views. It may just represent a club that he joined for expediency but came to appreciate for its food and privacy.
What About the Liberal and Labour Parties?
In contrast to the Conservatives and Unionists, few characters represent the Liberal and Labour parties.
In The White Feather (1907), one of the political candidates is Mr. Pedder, “an energetic Radical,” which undoubtedly means Liberal Party candidate. As noted above, Radicals were one of the political factions that constituted the Liberals, so the word did not necessarily have the negative connotation it might have today.
In The Intrusion of Jimmy (1910), we see a joking reference to a living politician. The narrator complains how wagering has declined from the “spacious days of the Regency” due to Liberal Party Prime Minister Asquith. The narrator continues, “When Mr. Asquith is dethroned, it is improbable that any Briton will allow his beard to remain unshaved until the Liberal party returns to office.”
In “Leave It to Jeeves” (1916), we read of a Mr. Digby Thistleton, who did so well by selling a hair growth tonic that he was “shortly afterward elevated to the peerage for services to the Liberal party.” This is undoubtedly a knowing reference to the not-yet-illegal and time-honored practice of selling honors for cash, which would reach something of an apogee under Lloyd George. As a side note, the tonic was undoubtedly as genuine a medicinal product as the “Peppo” and “Buck-U-Uppo” from other stories, which were apparently filled with alcohol and sent everyone from parrots to curates into a frenzy.
The Labour Party makes a brief appearance in Love Among the Chickens (1906/1921) when the narrator Jeremy Garnett encounters a small boy named Albert on the train to the Ukridge chicken farm. Albert annoys our hero by showing “a skill in logomachy that marked him out as a future Labour Member.” This description is not in the 1909 USA edition, where Albert is less creatively described as “the rudest boy on earth—a proud title, honestly won.”
What About the Devonshire Club?
As indicated above, Wodehouse typically disguised his clubs with false names, even if they are not difficult to identify. For example, Norman Murphy discussed how “Brown’s” is obviously “White’s.”
An exception is the Devonshire Club, which is identified both by name and location. It makes an appearance as the club of Lord Bittlesham in “The Delayed Exit of Claude and Eustace” (1922) and “Comrade Bingo” (1922). The Madame Eulalie annotations describe it thusly: “A Liberal political club, at 50 St. James’s St. It was founded in 1875, and in 1909 the annual subscription was 10 guineas. Bittlesham must have received his peerage from Lloyd George, who was the Liberal leader who was Prime Minister until 1922.”
While the club was originally affiliated with the Liberal Party, it became less political over time. By the time these two delightful stories were published, it was largely a social club. It carries on in amalgamated form as the “East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools’ Club,” which still resides in St. James’s Square.
The club is superfluous to the plot, so why did Wodehouse mention it? A young Wodehouse would have associated it with politics, and as he did not always update his political information, he may have continued to see it as a Liberal Party bastion in 1922.
The club was not of the aristocratic elite, like Boodle’s or Brooks’s. By assigning Lord Bittlesham to the club, he places him among the upper classes but not quite at the tip-top level.
Lord Bittlesham may not have our complete sympathy, but he is not the sort of man Wodehouse would have made a Conservative. His only fault is to have married and neglected to support his sponging nephew in the manner to which said sponging nephew would have liked to become accustomed.
What About All the Socialism?
Socialism makes regular appearances in the canon, so often that we might wonder if Wodehouse should be addressed as Comrade Wodehouse. The most prominent advocate is Psmith, who expresses socialist views over several decades that are not essential to the plots nor to his character development. Was Wodehouse giving this ideology a boost by assigning it to so sympathetic a character as Psmith?
In another Plum Lines essay, I argue that Psmith’s ideas and actions suggest he was not a leftist revolutionary but a traditionalist reactionary. In addition, the other socialists and communists we meet are not in the same league. These include Mr. Waller, the Heralds of the Red Dawn, Archibald Mulliner (temporarily), Keggs the butler, George Wellbeloved, and Lavender Briggs.
While Mr. Waller has our sympathy, the others do not command our affection.
Conclusion
Over many decades, Wodehouse repeatedly hit one of the major U.K. political parties with an axe. Contrary to those who see Wodehouse as a “small-c” conservative who revered the class system and the country house set, his target was not the Labour or Liberal party. Instead, he battered the Unionists and Conservatives, which later merged to form the Tories we know today. In addition, he regularly sprinkled unnecessary references to socialism into his writing, an odd but persistent pattern that we cannot overlook.
Why did Plum introduce partisanship into his Garden of Eden? I doubt the explanation is that Wodehouse yearned for the revolution. Is it likely that he looked forward to the day when “the blood of Lord Bittlesham and his kind flows in rivers down the gutters of Park Lane” and hoped to advance it by making Aubrey Upjohn a Conservative and Psmith a socialist? Instead, he was probably “getting his own back” at the Globe for making him write partisan drivel in support of the Tories.
While he undoubtedly appreciated this big break in the world of journalism, which allowed him to leave the bank, he likely chafed at the political writing. When he was free to write what he wished, he mined his real life and introduced a humorous but pointed political dimension that persisted for decades.
That the object of this humor was the Unionists and Conservatives was just an accident of history. If his first job was for a newspaper on the left and he was required to mock the Tories, Wodehouse might have made fun of Labour and the Liberals in his subsequent fiction. If so, he might have been viewed (fairly or not) as being on the Right in the 1920s and 1930s, and this would have had serious implications for the Berlin radio broadcast controversy. Imagine Roderick Spode and the Saviours of Britain as heroes, not the objects of mockery. It would have been easy for critics to connect the dots from such characters to the Nazi regime, and Wodehouse’s career and legacy might have suffered an irrecoverable blow.
So let us raise a glass and toast the Globe and its conservative world view. You can still read its successor today. The Globe merged into the Pall Mall Gazette, which in turn merged into the Evening Standard. Those living in the U.K. may know it as the paper that is handed out for free during the London evening rush hour, so take a copy and thank it for saving Plum from the bank in 1902—and perhaps from himself in 1941.
This essay is reprinted with permission from Plum Lines: The Quarterly Journal of The Wodehouse Society.
References
Doyle, Arthur Conan. 2012 [Originally published 1924]. Memories and Adventures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferris, Wesley. 2011. “The Candidates of the Liberal Unionist Party, 1886–1912.” Parliamentary History, v30(2): 142–157.
Green, Benny. 1981. P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography. London: Pavilion Books.
Leal, David L. 2020. “Psmith: Psocialist?” Plum Lines, v41(1): 5–8.
Murphy, N.T.P. 2016. A Wodehouse Handbook: Volume. 1, The World of Wodehouse. New Brunswick, Canada: Sybertooth.
Murphy, N.T.P. 2015. The P. G. Wodehouse Miscellany. Cheltenham: The History Press.
