"P.G.W." in the Malvernian

The Malvernian is the school magazine of Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, England (not to be confused with Malvern House, which P. G. Wodehouse attended between 1891 and 1893). A complete run of digitized copies is available at the College's website here.

The April 1901 issue contains a humorous article on country cricket, signed "P.G.W." Here it is in its entirety:

COUNTRY CRICKET.

"A chiel's amang ye takin' notes."

At last the task is completed! After a searching analysis we have divided country cricket into its component parts; reduced it, in fact, to the level of a formula. It has taken us many a summer holiday, but the deed is done, and we are at length able, with a heart swelling with proper pride, to offer the following facts for family consumption, with the assurance that they are not only scientifically correct, but wholly free from alkaloid and all other such deleterious ingredients.

To proceed, then. The first essential item in the village team is The Wag, the second, "Charles, his friend." The Wag is in nine cases out of ten the local Doctor—why, we cannot say, unless it be that a constant attendance at beds of sickness promotes a cheerful frame of mind.

In the event of the Doctor scratching for this post, the Curate is generally enrolled: though he is not quite so efficient as the disciple of Æsculapius, in that his jokes are apt to be less broad. Moreover, he will probably have certain scruples as to the exchanging of airy badinage with chance passers-by, the which should be the Wag's chief source of waggishness.

We now come to "Charles, his friend." He is an indispensable item. It must not be thought that, because his conversational powers are limited to a raucous laugh, he is therefore no help to the conversation. Far from it. A raucous laugh is a very present help in time of trouble, and what the Wag would do without Charles, we shudder to think.

Next the Captain. This onerous position generally falls to the lot of the Curate, the poor man being, in cases of emergency, obliged to sustain the posts of Captain and Wag simultaneously. The Captain may be distinguished by the profanum vulgus by the fact that he goes on to bowl first, and (please read this slowly and thoughtfully: it is an epigram) never comes off whether he comes off or not. Men may come and men may go at the other end with all the variety of a kaleidoscope, but he goes on for ever. It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that he can only bowl with wind and hill in his favour. When it is the turn of his side to bat, he naturally goes in first, "to give his men confidence."

Finally, the Hero. Every village team has its hero. He is generally a man who has failed ignominiously to justify his inclusion in a weak "Colts" Eleven, and is for that reason an object of veneration to all. He goes in first with the Captain, and shares the trundling with him, The rest of the team may be ranked as "villagers and retainers," after the fashion of Stageland.

P.G.W.

Naturally one wonders if "P.G.W." stands for P. G. Wodehouse. More precisely, if it stands for Pelham Grenville Wodehouse the humorist, because even "P. G. Wodehouse" in this case wouldn't narrow it down enough, as we will see below.

Summer Lightning: a variorum edition

Summer Lightning (variorum edition, PDF)

Summer Lightning (Fish Preferred in the US) is the sixth variorum edition I've completed. As in previous occasions, it benefited greatly from the work done by the Madame Eulalie team to edit and publish the magazine versions of this novel a couple of years ago.

There is not much to say in this introduction. Beyond it size and the number of footnotes needed, Summer Lightning has not been a particularly challenging text to edit, since the changes are straightforward and the novel did not undergo any major revisions. The apparatus shows that most of these are reduced to simple deletions in the American magazine version (Collier's). The rest are mainly slight improvements in wording made to the British magazine (Pall Mall), which I take to be the earliest redaction published. One exception of interest involves a few changes clearly made to fix a minor contradiction in the narrative, concerning Sue Brown's arrival at Blandings and her first meeting with Ronnie Fish.

I've also taken the opportunity to update all the variorum editions completed so far, with minor corrections. The latest versions are always downloadable from the Editions page on the right.

Alphonse the Page

The annotations to A Damsel in Distress offer two possible explanations for this short exchange between George Bevan and Maud's page Albert:

"'Ullo!" said the youth.
"Hullo, Alphonso!" said George.
"My name's not Alphonso."
"Well, you be very careful or it soon may be."

The initial suggestion was that this was a reference to W. S. Gilbert's poem "The Modest Couple," first published in Fun on August 8, 1868, which Wodehouse knew well and quoted elsewhere. However, there doesn't seem to be too much common ground for connecting Gilbert's character with Albert: his Alphonso is not a stereotypical page, but a young suitor full of self-confidence.

As an alternative I brought up a scene in Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby, where a boy who "carried plain Bill in his face and figure" and is in the service of a lady of quality is re-christened "Alphonse" and dressed in the many-buttoned uniform of a page. This is exactly the situation Albert is in in Wodehouse's novel, justifying George's warning. At the time I thought this was conclusive.

There is more to it though, because lately I've found out that Dickens' passage is not alone. In summary, just as "Jane" was a generic name for housemaids, there appears to have been a tradition of renaming pages as "Alphonse/Alphonso." This may be first documented in Nicholas Nickleby but extends even into the twentieth century. In what follows I will put together the traces of evidence I have collected so far.

Tales of Saint Austin's: a variorum edition

Tales of St. Austin's (variorum edition, PDF)

This is the fifth edition of its kind I've completed. It has been in the works for some time, but I couldn't make up my mind to finish and publish it, partly because I'm concentrating on the early novels rather than the short story collections, but mostly because I do not have access to the first but only to the 1923 edition, which according to McIlvaine's bibliography was reset, and so may contain differences. However, it is not certain tha I will ever get a chance to take a look at the 1903 edition, so I decided that there was no point in postponing this one indefinitely.

The work in this case has been considerably simpler than in all previous occasions. Although here one has to sort out publications from different magazines, the changes between all but one of the texts are few an straighforward; all the magazine versions are perfectly described and transcribed at Madame Eulalie; and there was no early American edition of the book to complicate matters.

The exception in the case is the long story or novella "The Manoeuvres of Charteris." Other stories present between no and twelve significant changes between the magazine text and their final book version; "The Manoeuvres," in contrast, had about 500: you can see that the apparatus for that section of this file takes one third of the page, whereas in the rest you find only two of three notes per page, and not a few perfectly "clean" pages. Some of the changes on the longer story are substantial, such as added or deleted sentences or paragraphs, but many are changes of expression, slight improvements and minimal adjustments in word order. My personal impression, without other support than the observation of these changes, is that Wodehouse re-typed "The Manoeuvres" and rewrote freely whenever he saw he could enhance the text; while for the rest of the stories the editor worked either from the original manuscript, a typist's copy of it, or the magazine texts, where the author may pencil in some necessary corrections but could hardly make the huge number of alterations observed here.

[Some notes on sources for the artists that illustrated these stories in magazines: not because they are relevant to this textual study, but because this information is not always easy to find, so I thought I would put together these links here.

• R. Noel Pocock and T. M. R. Whitwell, whose magazine illustrations eventually made it into the book editions of Wodehouse's early stories, aren't included in standard reference books, but fortunately there exists this incredible blog devoted to the history of British illustrators, which contains invaluable information abot each (Pocock, Whitwell).
• E. F. (Edward Frederick) Skinner seems to be the hardest to find anything about, but at least there is a short entry in S. Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800-1914.
• Savile Lumley is the best known of the four, with his own Wikipedia article, entries in B. Peppin, Book Illustrators of the Twentieth Century (link) and M. Bryant, Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (link), and another great blog entry.]

Merrett's French prize

In Wodehouse's short story "A Division of Spoil" (The Captain, September 1906, online here) there is a mathematical error. The boy Merrett has unlawfully won a prize in French, and the rest of the class are not happy about it, so Linton seizes the book that constitutes the prize and says:

"... as we've all got just as much right to the prize as you, we're going to divide it."
"I say—" said a voice of protest. Tilbury had come out second in the French order, and he had not looked for this Communistic arrangement.
"Dry up," said Linton. "And if you come any nearer, Merrett, you'll get it hot. Follow? There are five hundred and sixteen pages of this book. How much is that each, some one?"
A pause.
"Thirteen, exactly," said Firmin.

Someone pointed it out in a letter which the editor answered in the November issue (p. 190):

"Three Years' Subscriber," referring to the story by Mr. Wodehouse entitled "A Division of Spoil," published in our September issue, says that if a book of 516 pages was divided among a class of 32 boys, each boy would get 16⅛ pages, and not 13, as the author had it. Quite right, T. Y. S. You may go up above Mr. Wodehouse.

Yet another reader attempted to explain the error (January 1907, p. 380):

"Romney" turns the tables on me by telling me my character from my handwriting. I have put her delineation in my top blush locker. With regard to the mathematical mistake in Mr. Wodehouse's tale, "A Division of Spoil," to which "Subscriber" recently drew attention, "Romney" says it is quite easy to see that "516" pages was a printer's error for "416," and that the latter number of pages gives thirty-two boys exactly thirteen each, so that Mr. Wodehouse goes up top again. This is all very well, but "Romney" is wrong in one little particular. The "516" was not a printer's error, but was the number actually given by the author in his tale, so that Mr. Wodehouse, after going up, comes down again with a run.

It appears, then, that the miscalculation was Wodehouse's—unless we are meant to think that Firmin, the boy who answered the question, got the division wrong. But in that case, if the physical book actually had 516 pages and Linton gave his 32 classmates 13 pages each, there would have been a hundred pages left over at the end. However, that doesn't happen: Linton runs out of pages exactly as Merrett's turn comes, and adds "You can have the cover." The book must have had 416 pages after all.

(And that is leaving aside the difficult question of how you can tear an uneven number of pages from a book, since you can only take full leaves, each with two pages. But even if we assume that Linton gave 14 pages—7 leaves—to each, that still makes 448 pages, with 68 left at the end. One might suppose that Wodehouse is using "page" loosely in the sense of "leaf," and that the total number of pages was twice 516, that is, 1,032, but this is unlikely, and the calculation would still be wrong.)

The book in question was a "handsomely bound copy of Les Misérables." Since it is presented as a prize for knowledge of French, we may safely assume that we are dealing with a French edition, not a translation. Now, Victor Hugo's "novel as a whole is one of the longest ever written, with 655,478 words in the original French" (Wikipedia). It was first published in 5 parts with a total of about 1,900 pages, and is seldom issued in one volume. It would be extremely difficult to fit it in 416 or 516 pages. What Merrett won must have been either only one volume or an abridged edition.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that Wodehouse just made up the book and the number of pages. But as it happens there was at the time a popular edition in French for English readers "abridged and annotated with introduction, notes and vocabulary by O. B. Super when Professor of Romance Languages in Dickinson College." This would be the right kind of book to be given as a prize to a schoolboy, a learning tool rather than a daunting full-length copy of Les Misérables. Not unlike Dr. Giles' "crib" to Greek and Latin authors mentioned earlier in the story.

It existed in several editions, but the one closest both to the date of publication of the story and also to at least one of the required amounts of pages was printed in America by D. C. Heath in 1903 and can be read at the Internet Archive here. It has 391 numbered pages, but if you add 8 pages of titles and introduction, frontispice, blank endpapers and (at a pinch) covers you can almost reach 416, and after all what matters for the division of spoil is the number of physical leaves. (In fact, a copy at HathiTrust has exactly 416 page scans including covers, although some of them seem to be counted twice.)

It may not be possible now to give a definite answer to the rather unimportant question of whether Wodehouse used this particular edition as a reference. If he did, a simple slip would explain the error. It would be nice to discover a copy of it in a library with an incorrect sum "392 + 8 + 16 = 516" hastily jotted down in his handwriting at the end, but until that happens all this must remain within the realm of speculation.

Wodehouse's Top Twelve in 1935

In an interview published in the Christmas 1935 number of The Book Window: A Guide to Book Buying and Book Reading Wodehouse was asked what were the twelve funniest books he had read, which is an uncharitable question to spring on anyone, especially if you're going to print the answer. I haven't seen the interview (very few libraries even keep copies of The Book Window, and it's certainly impossible to find online), but fortunately several newspapers quoted extracts from it in 1936.

Here's Wodehouse's list as quoted. I'm adding dates for reference, and links to copies of each in the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg when available:

• The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens) 1836 IA PG
• Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Stephen Leacock) 1912 IA PG
• Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh) 1928 IA
• My Life and Hard Times (James Thurber) 1933 IA
• Poor Relations (Compton Mackenzie) 1919 IA PG
• A Master of Craft (W. W. Jacobs) 1900 IA PG
• At Sunwich Port (W. W. Jacobs) 1902 IA PG
• Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome) 1889 IA PG
• Ma Pettengill (Harry Leon Wilson) 1919 IA PG
• Vice Versa (F. Anstey) 1882 IA PG
• Mop Fair (Arthur M. Binstead) 1905 IA
• Edwards (Barry Pain) 1915

I doubt that Wodehouse meant the list to be ranked, although the Dickensian for the next March didn't fail to notice that Pickwick was at the head of it. The selection is well-distributed and representative of different periods, with the latest choice being as recent as 1933. Some of the authors are established classics, and others like Waugh were rapidly rising stars at the time. The least known may be Binstead. Pain was very popular until the 20s, but a lot of his books have not been digitized yet. Edwards was first serialized in Pearson's Magazine during 1914, so it can be read at Google Books (vol. 37, vol 38) or HathiTrust (vol. 37, vol. 38).

Six of them (Dickens, Leacock, Jacobs, Jerome, Wilson, Pain) had pieces in A Century of Humour, which Wodehouse had edited the previous year. In the prologue he had bragged that the fact that the editor had asked him to edit the anthology entitled him "to wear pince-nez and talk about Trends and Cycles and the Spirit of Comedy and What Is The Difference Between Humour and Wit," only to dodge the question of the alleged difference. Perhaps it was this that led the interviewer to ask for a new statement on the subject, which came out in this form:

I agree as to the unsatisfactory nature of the usual definitions of wit and humour, due, no doubt, to the difficulty of distinguishing the one from the other.
If I may attempt a solution, I should say that wit is unkinder than humour. The idea inherent in wit would seem to be that it is an attempt to score a hit; it is an effort to get back on someone else. to get back on someone else. Humour is kindly, and seeks to give pleasure to others; wit is regardless of others, and aims at personal triumph.
Perhaps that is why humorous writing seems to require a long apprenticeship. That, at any rate, appears to be the moral of my own experience. I had actually written twenty-one books before one sold to the extent of more than two thousand copies. Why? Probably they were not very good, and it was necessary for me to try and try again before I was able to achieve something which had a general appeal.

Another interesting bit of the interview is quoted, where W. somehow apologizes for the preference given to British authors:

Only two of these are American, but I am a great admirer of American humour. Most of the best of it, however, does not appear in book form, but in columns of the daily papers, and in weeklies like the 'New Yorker.'

The Americans are Wilson and Thurber (and one ought to remember that Leacock was mostly Canadian). This reflection should be read in connection with what he had said twenty years earlier in an interview published in the New York Times, about Britain having lost much of its sense of humor and being behind the United States in that regard.

[The main question is how many of these titles one had already read at the time of discovering the list. For the record, my own personal score is 6 out of 12, which is not so bad.]

Something Different

In his column for Punch, July 17, 1957 Wodehouse wrote:

Leonard F. Genz of Greenwich, Conn., is a man who can be pushed just so far. When they upped his Federal and State taxes, as they are doing all the time these days, he did not wince nor cry aloud but wrote a cheque and posted it to the local vampire bats. But when he got a New York State tax form which included the words "Give complete address used for 1956 if different than the above" he felt the time had come to make a stand. He wrote to Governor Harriman about it. I don't know what he said, but it was probably something not very different than "Well, youse guys up in Albany certainly laid an egg that time. Ain't you never been to school and been learned grammar? Where do you get that 'different than' stuff? Different from, you poor uneducated slobs."
The point, in the opinion of most taxpayers, is well taken. What I mean to say, ginks like I and you and the rest of us we don't mind having our blood sucked annually by a bunch of Draculas, but we think they got a nerve when they suck it like as if they'd never of heard of any such a bozo as Fowler, if you see what I mean.

To be fair, they wouldn't have found an answer in the first edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), which doesn't even mention "different than" in its discussion of whether different can only be followed by from or if to is also admissible. Fowler derides the idea that to is to be rejected on the basis that it never accompanies the root verb differ (i.e., "You do not say differ to; therefore you cannot say different to" is mere superstition and/or pedantry). They would have to wait for Burchfield's New Fowler (1996) to be enlightened, only to find that all forms—from, to, than—are equally valid in the new editor's opinion, based both on Fowler's logic and on the history of English, since the OED shows that all the combinations have been used for centuries.

But at the time Mr. Genz actually won the argument. As it happens, we do know exactly what he wrote to Governor W. A. Harriman and what the Governor replied and did, because the incident was reported in many newspapers since around May 1957, with more or less creativity on the part of the reporters. The Buffalo Courier-Express for May 5 writes, for example:

Harvard. Princeton Men Are Blamed
Tax Blanks' Grammatical Error Vexes Yale Grad
ALBANY, May 4 (AP)—Gov. Harriman today advised a fellow Yale graduate that a grammatical error on New York's income tax form was the work of a Harvard man and "an untutored editor who professes to be 'a Princetonian at heart.'"
Harriman wrote to Leonard F. Genz of Greenwich, Conn., that Genz had been the first in years to spot the error, and assured Genz it would be corrected on next year's forms.
Genz wrote to the Governor and complained that the form said: "Give complete address used for 1955 if different than above."
"On next year's forms," Genz asked, "may we please have English and Connecticut grammar (instead of New York grammar) and the expression 'different from?'"
Harriman replied that investigation had turned up the Harvard and Princeton men as the culprits.
He said that "for reasons now obscure, they chose to disregard the purists and cling to the "'different than'—perhaps for emphasis or because of common usage."
The Governor said the correction would cause no extra expense, since new forms must be printed anyway.
And he assured Genz that "the amount of your 1957 tax will not, on that account at all events, be different from last year's."

I haven't been able to find copies of NY income tax forms from that period to compare them—or rather, I waded through dozens of Google hits, but couldn't locate the exact forms with the offending phrase and its correction, but then I am not a NY taxpayer so I haven't been brought up to navigate that maze of paperwork.

Other periodicals provide more color or interesting additional information. The Schenectady Gazette for May 7 has: "Gov. Harriman said Mr. Genz was the first to notice the error although millions of tax forms have been distributed. The governor is mistaken. A number of persons have noticed the error. But most people are so anxious to get to the point where the tax is computed that they have little inclination to ponder over wording that is different from, or different than, what it should be." A later summary in the Albany Times-Union for August 20 informs us that "The Herald Tribune went so far as to take a dig at those 'ignorant fools in Albany who don't know anything except how to separate the citizen from his money." A new Jersey paper ridiculed the controversy with this sentence: 'A man and a dog are both different from a fox, but the man is more different than the dog.'" We also learn from the second source that "Genz, the man who started it all, is a business executive in New York who makes a hobby of spotting grammatical errors. Once he caught Winston Churchill in a slip, in one of his books, which won him a lunch with Churchill aboard the Queen Elizabeth." I haven't traced this last incident, which if true promises to be fraught with interest.

* * *

Going back to Wodehouse, given his strong opposition to than in this construction, it is to be expected that he stuck to from always. And so he did, as far as I've been able to ascertain. The only exception (apart from the ironic "something not very different than" in Punch above) would be the phrase "it's no different than marrying an heiress" in chapter 15 of The Luck of the Bodkins. But this is found only in the British edition (Jenkins 1935 and its successors Autograph, Penguin, Overlook). The American edition (Little 1936), which prints an earlier, shorter version of the novel, has in chapter 14 "it's not different from marrying an heiress," and the two serializations agree: "it wouldn't be any different from marrying an heiress" (Redbook in the UK and The Passing Show in the US). I have no doubt that Wodehouse's first and only choice here was from, and that than is the work of his British editor or a typesetter.

Searching digital repositories for more instances of "different than" produces what turns out to be a false positive. In chapter 14.7 of Bring On the Girls the somewhat convoluted sentence "It is hard to imagine two worlds more different than the one the authors said good-bye to as they left the Impney and that into which they plunged upon disembarking from the Aquitania" may appear at first glance to contain the solecism, but a closer look reveals that "than" in this case is governed not by "different" but by "more." This becomes clearer if one restores the elided complement of different: "two worlds more different [from each other] than the one ... and that into which ..."