The Blandings Castle Saga

I have, quite by chance, undertaken the reading of P. G. Wodehouse's "Blanding Castle Saga." I plan to review the individual books in my The Saturday Morning Post, so in this post I'll just outline the setting of the saga, the castle that gives it's name, its usual inhabitants, mention some of the guests, many of whom arrive as imposters, and livestock. I owe a lot of the information on Blandings itself to the 1977 hardcover book, Sunset at Blandings, which includes Wodehouse's last and unfinished Blandings story, along with a map and house plan of Blandings Castle drawn by Ionicus with an accompany essay on the setting by Richard Usborne.

So to begin, with a warning to authors;

'...there is nothing an author to-day has to guard himself against more carefully than the Saga habit. The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him. He writes a story. Another story dealing with the same characters occurs to him, and he writes that. He feels that just one more won't hurt him, and he writes a third. And before he knows where he is, he is down with a Saga, and no cure in sight.' P G Wodehouse in the preface to Blandings Castle.

A Blandings Castle novel always includes the castle's proprietor, the absent minded Lord Emesworth, often his equally empty headed son Freddie Treepwood, his domineering sister Aunt Connie, his butler Beach, sometimes his sinister secretary, the Efficient Baxter, and the later stories, his pig The Empress of Blanding. 

The books below listed in reading order constitute Wodehouse's second greatest saga, after the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves saga.    

Something Fresh (1915) (aka Something New in America)

Leave it to Psmith (1923)

Blandings Castle  Includes six short stories written between 1924 to 1931; The Custody of the Pumpkin, Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best, Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey, Company for Gertrude, The Gogetter, and Lord Elmsworth and the Girl Friend

Summer Lightening (1929)

Heavy Weather (1933)

"The Crime Wave at Blandings" (short story, 1937)

Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939)

Full Moon (1947)

"Birth of a Salesman" (short story 1950)

Pigs Have Wings (1952)

Service with a Smile (1961)

Galahad at Blandings (1965)

"Sticky Wicket at Blandings" (Short story 1966)

A Pelican at Blandings (1969)

Sunset at Blandings (1977) an untitled novel which Wodehouse was in the process of writing on his death bed.

They are all stand alone books in that they can be read and enjoyed in any order, though references to earlier incidents may be included. Below is Blandings Castle from the air, as drawn by Ionicus, who illustrated the Penguin books in the 1960 & 70's, and who I consider the definitive P G  Wodehouse illustrator.  

Blandings Castle

Blandings Castle and its cast of characters are firmly set in the Wodehouse "universe." While I don't think Bertie and Jeeves were ever a guest at Blandings, an Emsworth a maybe cousin of sorts, Algernon Wooster did stay there in Something Fresh (or New, if you have the American book). And readers familiar with many members of the Drones Club will find familiar names amount the guests, including Monty Bodkin, Ronnie Fish, Hugo Carmody, Rev. Rupert "Beefers" Bingham, and Pongo Twistleton. Psmith, in Leave it to Psmith, is also a member, and who was an early Wodehouse character first appearing in a boy's story Mike and Psmith, and then went on to star in two earlier books, Psmith in the City, and Psmith Journalist, before arriving at Blandings Castle in the guise of the Canadian poet, Ralston McTodd. 

Below is a map of Blandings countryside, and of the various locales mentioned in the books. Hopefully if you click on it, it will come up large enough to explore.

Blandings Castle, Grounds, & Surrounding Countryside

Blandings Castle is set in the west of England, in the county of Shropshire, a four hour train ride from London's Paddington Station. Wodehouse found it a slightly inconvenient locale in that he couldn't have his characters easily popping up to London to do something and return in the same day in time for dinner.

Blandings Castle is said to be one of the oldest inhabited houses in England. It "stands  upon a knoll of riding ground at the  southern end of the celebrated Vale of Blandings in the country of Shropshire. Away in the blue distance wooded hills ran down to where the Severn gleamed like an unsheathed sword; while up from the river rolling park-land, mounting and dipping, surged in a green wave almost to the castle walls, breaking upon the terraces in a many-colored flurry of flowers as it reached the spot were the province of Angus McAllister, his lordship's head gardener, began."

On the map above you will note some of the major features mentioned in the book, including the old and new pig sty, the residence of Lord Emsworth's prize winning pig, The Empress of Blanding, the lake where Lord Emsworth makes it a habit to bath each morning in summer, the mossy Yew Alley that Angus MacAllister would like paved with gravel, and in the upper right corner, Market Blandings, where the train from London stops, some two miles from the castle.

Market Blandings is said to be the perfect quaint old English town, almost untouched by the passing of time. Market Blandings's Elmsworth Arms is the favorite inn in the saga, though the little town also offers excellent beer at the Wheatsheaf, the Wagoneer's Rest, the Beetle and Wedge, the Stitch in Time, the Blue Cow, the Blue Boar, the Blue Dragon, and the Jolly Cricketers, and several more. "In most English country towns, if the public-houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the inn-keepers blaming the Government."

The proprietor of Blanding Castle is the ninth Earl of Emsworth, Clarence Treepwood, best known as Lord Emsworth. He is "normally as happy as only a fluffy-minded man with excellent health and a large income can be. A writer, describing Blandings Castle in a magazine article had once said 'Tiny mosses have grown in the cavities of the stones until, viewed near at hand, the places seems shaggy with vegetation.' It would not have been a bad description of its proprietor. Fifty-odd years of serene and unruffled placidity had given Lord Emsworth a curiously moss-covered look. Very few things had the power to disturb him. Even his younger son, the Hon. Freddie Treepwood, could only do it occasionally" However, it has to be said that in the books he is often disturbed by the various alarms and excursions of the castle's guests who arrive, often as imposters, for various reasons. It is sad to say that when I first read these stories, Lord Emsworth was a rather absent minded 60 year old man, and now as I reread these stories, what the fuck, he's 13 years my junior. That's dashed sad.

The Blandings Castle Saga is, unlike the Bertie Wooster stories, told in third person, and while on the whole I prefer the Bertie Wooster stories, especially the early ones, I find that I am enjoying these tales perhaps even more than when I first read them. That said, I am going to have my work cut out for me when I get around to writing the reviews of each, as while a great deal happens in each story, they all follow a very similar pattern; true love foiled by a lack of money and/or the opposition of Aunt Connie. It seems that Lord Elmsworth is the trustee for various nieces and nephews and so the needed capital for the proposed onion soup bar, to get married, or what have you, must be pried out of him, usually over the objections of his sister, Aunt Connie and usually because of the unsuitability of the prospective marriage due to class prejudice.

As I said, there is a pattern to these stories, despite being extremely intricate when it comes to plot. I found that I was missing two of the later books, so they are now in the mail as I post this. More about Blandings in the Saturday posts coming in a few weeks.

Another version of Blandings Castle