I have been a voracious reader of Wodehouse since I was a teenager. I started with Right Ho, Jeeves, and after a couple false starts, I was hooked. I had a copy of the Penguin edition with an iconic Ionicus cover, which I remember liking at the time. However, it never occurred to me, until some years later, that there were illustrated versions of these stories floating around. (Right Ho, Jeeves cover image from the Ionicus Wodehouse Cover Gallery.) The first time I really got hep to that notion was when I checked a well-worn copy of the Didier edition of The Mating Season out of my university library, and was astonished to find that it was liberally illustrated with line drawings. I didn't like them much at the time (the characters didn't look the way I had envisioned them!), but I was smitten by the idea of it. More on those particular illustrations later. What really struck me, when I finally did start digging up illustrations from the 1910s and '20s publications of the Jeeves stories in magazines and newspapers, was the wide range of artistic interpretations I encountered. Some things are consistent. The image of Sir Roderick Glossop prancing around with his gigantic bald head and bristling eyebrows, brandishing an umbrella, is one that no illustrator could resist, and they all did it in essentially the same way. There is also a certain commonality in the earliest representations of Jeeves, although they soon start to splinter off into a myriad of different types. But no two Berties are alike. Reading back over the source material, the reason for this begins to become apparent. Wodehouse was extremely sparing with his physical descriptions of his characters. We are given the sketchiest indication, and from there the reader conjures up their own vivid mental picture. And while it is reasonably clear that Wodehouse had his own ideas about what exactly these characters looked like, he doled out that information in tiny tidbits over a period of several decades. Despite the fact that Bertie Wooster made his debut in 1915 ("Extricating Young Gussie"), the world didn't learn that his eyes were blue until his friend Chuffy mentioned it in passing in 1934 (Thank You, Jeeves). I hope you will enjoy tagging along with me on this goofy quest to figure out just what the dickens these characters were supposed to look like.
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AuthorI'm a Wodehouse fan who also loves vintage illustrations. ArchivesCategories
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