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.

First, concerning Maud's model for her ideal page: she "wanted him to be as like as he could to a medieval page, one of those silk-and-satined little treasures she had read about in the Ingoldsby Legends." None of the (foot-)pages or errand boys found in the Legends (published in 1837) is called Alphonse, but they are characterized by a uniform with plenty of unnecessary buttons, especially when attending on the nobility: thus we read, for example, "a careless young rascal he'd hired as a Page, / All buttons and brass" ("The Blasphemer's Warning") or "Master José was a youth well-favoured, and comely to look upon. His office was that of page to the dame ... clad, for the most part, in garments fitted tightly to the shape, the lower moiety adorned with a broad strip of crimson or silver lace, and the upper with what the first Wit of our times has described as 'a favourable eruption of buttons'" ("The Leech of Folkestone").

Then comes Dickens' novel in 1838-1839:

Upon this doubtful ground, lived Mrs. Wititterly, and at Mrs. Wititterly's door Kate Nickleby knocked with trembling hand. The door was opened by a big footman with his head floured, or chalked, or painted in some way (it didn't look genuine powder), and the big footman, receiving the card of introduction, gave it to a little page; so little, indeed, that his body would not hold, in ordinary array, the number of small buttons which are indispensable to a page's costume, and they were consequently obliged to be stuck on four abreast. [...]
"Place chairs."
The page placed them.
"Leave the room, Alphonse."
The page left it; but if ever an Alphonse carried plain Bill in his face and figure, that page was the boy.

J. Leech in The Church-Goer (1845) p. 18 wrote:

a lofty perked-up looking dowager approached, followed by one of those non-descripts, made of buttons and braid, called 'a page.' Like all of his class it was impossible to tell his age; a long dark fur on his upper lip, and a certain hardness of feature told one he had arrived at that mysterious epoch where man and boy meet; while the childishness attempted to be imparted to his figure in other respects, showed that an effort had been made by his aspiring mistress to convert him into something between a Cupid and a Ganymede. He was so packed and squeezed into his jacket and trousers, and all the protuberances of his body were so pressed in and imprisoned, you felt in contemplating him a most uncomfortable misgiving lest, like most things too cruelly imposed upon, they would one day or another revolt, and laughing to scorn all the ingenuity of tailoring and the power of stitches, burst forth in native fulness and form to the world. This poor boy had certainly parted not only with his liberty, but with his second prerogative, for he was like nothing in nature but—a page: save for the rows of buttons and the hat, which he held up with his ears, the creature would have looked like a crocodile, and even that would have been preferable, for better be like a crocodile than nothing. He carried a small gilt edged prayer book, about the size of a set of ivory tablets, for his mistress, and to bear this and himself upright seemed his principal business. She had romantically, too, re-baptized him "Alphonse." Alphonse walked up to the pew, and placing the prayer book there, turning on his heel, took up his position in the gallery by a full-blown footman.

Next we have a humorous poem, "The Little Foot-Page," in Chambers's Journal (October 6, 1855, p. 224), signed "A. W."; it was later reprinted in Bentley's Miscellany for 1856 as "A Page of the Times" with the author's full name Alfred A. Watts. The re-christening of servants, the buttons, and duties such as accompanying his mistress to church make an appearance. Since this page's name is Bill, the author may have had Dickens in mind:

No jewel in his cap he wore, no plume in pagelike pride;
No lute upon his back, he bore no dagger by his side:
He never had long silken hose, or wore a satin blouse;
Nor did he ever bear a rose on either of his shoes.
In ladies' bowers he ne'er was seen; he ne'er sang ballads anyhow;
His name was not Alphonse, Eugene, Lucentio, or Ascanio.

But the names which to Pages were given of yore,
And the name of the Page I am speaking of, bore
As much likeness as Sukey to Eleanore,
Or Betty to Phyllis and Lalage;
From such Pages he was just as different as
A page out of Butler's Hudibras
From a page out of Butler's Analogy.

He was clad in a totally different way,
In the exquisite taste of the present day,
In a light little jacket of rifle-green,
Whereupon three bright rows of gilt buttons were seen—
Every button most sadly suggestive to me
Of amphibious fashion and finery.
And, to make the difference greater still,
This little Foot-Page's name was Bill.

His duties, so far as I'm able to tell,
Were to open the door and to answer the bell;
To fetch the books from Hookham's; to look
At his master's letters, and tease the cook;
To walk after his mistress to church, and wait
At table; and meet, I may likewise state,
The collateral claims of the knives and plate;
And to fill, to the family's pride and joy,
The place of a man at the price of a boy.

I knew not whether to smile or sigh
At my friend's Procrustean philosophy,
But I know that I very much longed to say:
'Pitch the Page to Old Harry, dear madam, I pray;
He's a sham and pretence: if you can't keep a man,
Get some "neat-handed Phyllis" instead, till you can;
And boldly abandoning "Buttons," employ
An "Anne Page" instead of a "lubberly boy."'

Next, several plays of the period have page characters called Alphonse (although none of them suggests that this is not their real name):

• [A Squib for] The Fifth of November by A. Mayhew and H. S Edwards (1851).
• Hotel Charges; or, How to Cook a Biffin! by Charles Selby (1853) includes the character "ALPHONSE (a page in buttons);" his costume is again described as "Page's suit, with buttons." He doesn't have any speaking lines in the play, but he does have a lot of comical "business," and at one point is seen presenting toasted bread, as in Payn's quote below.
• The Man of Many Friends by J. Sterling Coyne (1855).

An article "Devil's Dust" in Chambers's Journal for February 16, 1861 (unsigned, but the Curran Index identifies the author as George Dodd) includes this passage, with stereotypical names for different types of servants:

Shoddy is a mass of woolly particles, obtained by tearing or 'deviling' up old worsted stockings, blankets, rugs, and carpets; while mungo is a similar but somewhat better material, obtained by tearing up old woollen garments and tailors' cuttings. The coat of Lord Peerless, the Livery of James the footman, the buttoned jacket of Alphonse the page, the carpet of his lady's drawing-room, the worsted stockings of John the Gardener—all, when fitted for nothing else, are consigned to the Batley district, where they acquire a new lease of existence, and claim a place among the useful things available to us.

Then James Payn in his column "Our Note-Book" (ILN, June 2, 1888; the quotes clearly show that "Alphonse" was not his true name):

The "Lady and the Page" is a very pretty poem, but the relations between these personages are not always of a poetic character. I have even heard ladies, who are not given to denounce servants as the "greatest plague of life," express themselves with exceptional vigour against pages. "Alphonse," in his bright buttons, handing bread-and-butter on a silver salver and looking as if the butter would not melt in his mouth, is said to be a very different being outside the drawing-room door.

[I haven't found a poem titled the "Lady and the Page," but I think Payn means an episode in Alexander Smith's dialogue in verse "A Life-Drama" (Poems, 1853, pp. 49ff). The episode is narrated by the protagonist, Walter, to the lady he is wooing. It doesn't have a title, but it is sometimes referred to as "The Page and the Lady," particularly by G. Gilfillan in "A New Poet in Glasgow" published in The Critic, December 1, 1851. ("The following article, the second on Smith by Gilfillian, introduced Smith to about six thousand readers before he had even published a book of poetry, and caused Smith's first volume to be eagerly anticipated."—M. L. Onorato and D. Kanisec, Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 59, p. 254.) Walter's story is a romantic dialogue between a blasé lady and her page Leopard, and justifies the contrast between the poetic nature of the relationship between lady and page in such stories and the more prosaic character of real-life ladies and pages like those described by Dickens or Wodehouse.]

Finally, toward the end of the century we find examples of pages called "Alphonso" instead of the French form "Alphonse": Kipling in 1888 (Letters, p. 208) mentions "Alphonso the Page" as a nickname, and in a 1907 pantomime Babes in the Wood a character is "Alphonso, the Page." It is possible that the popularity of Gilbert's poem contributed to this shift between the aristocratic-sounding French form and the one more commonly used in English.

———

Such are the traces of this tradition that I have been able to collect so far. It may be wondered whether it is a real-life custom that is being satirized rather than a literary cliché, initiated perhaps by Dickens' successful novel. The practice of renaming servants ("Jane" for housemaids, "James" for footmen, "Thomas" for coachmen and so on—rather depersonalizing if you ask me) is so well documented that I tend to believe the former is the case, but I'd like to see more conclusive evidence culled tfrom he ocean of Victorian literature. In any case, I'm convinced that Wodehouse's Albert is a very late representative of this long lineage of Alphonses/Alphonsos, whether fictional or historical.

Tales of Saint Austin's: a variorum edition

Tales of St. Austin's (variorum edition) (PDF, 2,126 KB)

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 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 ..."

The Little Warrior: a variorum edition

The Little Warrior (variorum edition) (PDF, 4,732 KB)

The Little Warrior (Jill the Reckless in the UK) is Wodehouse's longest book ever. At more than 117,000 words in its most complete form it is even longer than Mike, which is in reality two novels rolled into one. This variorum edition—the fourth of its kind published in this blog—analyzes four versions (two magazines and two books), and not surprisingly it has a bulky apparatus, with 1250 footnotes. It has taken a very long time: if I recall correctly, I have been working on it intermittently for the last two and a half years.

However, the edition itself is not as complex as those of other, shorter novels. A close look at the apparatus will show that the vast majority of the changes between the longest version and the rest are mere deletions, some of them substantial, and never affect the plot or the characterization. Even the dialectal differences between British and American texts are relatively scarce, more so than in the case of other books with a double edition; and apart from that the cases of rewriting are minimal. One suspects that most if not all of the changes are due not to Wodehouse but to his editors.

There is a difference of almost 4,000 words between the US book (used as base text here) and its British counterpart. It is a pity that the full version was not reprinted again after the 1920s: all later official editions, including the current Everyman/Overlook and Penguin, have the shorter version. Fortunately the novel was early enough that digitized copies are easily found on the internet, not to mention the Gutenberg project (and print-on-demand services picked it up immediately), but still it would be nice to have a proper edition of the American text.

I suppose this variorum is even more riddled with errors than usual. I will probably review it at some point in the future. Some of the texts I would like to check in case they contain any interesting changes are the (first) Canadian version in Maclean's, and the few British editions published, Autograph and Everyman/Overlook. I also think that I omitted to mention some notable typesetter's errors. But for the moment I'd rather let this text rest for a while and turn to something fresh.

The Two Johnnies

There is a very, very elusive bit of song lyric quoted in chapter 10.3 of Wodehouse's novel Frozen Assets (1964): "By the time Henry returned, fully clad and looking, as the song has it, like a specimen of the dressy men you meet up west," and again in chapter 2.3 of The Girl in Blue (1970): "it was apparently her aim to convert him into what a songwriter earlier in the century once described as a specimen of the dressy men you meet up West."

N. Murphy in A Wodehouse Handbook suggested that Wodehouse had in mind Burlington Bertie from Bow (1915) by William Hargreaves (see annotations to The Girl in Blue). But this is a well-known song, and its lyrics, which can be read in Wikipedia, do not really match the quotation.

Murphy's date is more or less correct, however. The song was recalled occasionally by a few writers during the 20th century, who provide more lyrics. F. Beckett, for example, in his biography of John Beckett (1894-1964) says that his father remembered and sang music-hall songs from his youth, "not just the ones everyone remembers" (and he cites Burlington Bertie from Bow), "but also long-forgotten ditties": 

We're Cholly and Dolly
We're two of the best.
We are specimen of the dressy men
You meet up west.
And when in the morning down Bond Street we trot
Every Molly and Polly
Says "Golly, how jolly.
It's Cholly and Dolly. What what?"

A slightly different version is quoted by O. Sitwell in his novel Miracle on Sinai (1933), where it is called "a song which had been popular a year or two before the War":

Cholly and Dolly
Are two of the best.
They are a specimen of the dressy men
You meet out West:
And in the morning
When down Bond Street they trot,
Every Polly and Molly cries "Golly, how jolly,
Here's Cholly and Dolly; what, what!"

Wodehouse's version is closer to the first, with "up west" instead of "out west."

[By the way, I suspect that Wodehouse made a more veiled allusion to the last lines in the phrase "Golly, Polly, isn't this jolly, here we all are, what?" in chapter 9 of Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939).]

An article on "Lyric-Making" in The Globe for November 2, 1915 testifies to the early rise of the song to the rank of a classic: "It is but seldom that the lyric-writer is allowed to wander into trisyllabic paths, as in the deathless couplet: 'I am specimen of the dressy men,' which delighted musical comedy audiences some few years ago."

Now, in 1913-4 there existed a short-lived but very popular variety duo composed by Guy Struthers and Guy Grahame, known as "Guy and Grahame" or "The Two Johnnies." Their most successful act was called "Cholly, M.P., and Dolly, M.P." A review in The Era for January 14, 1914 reads: "Guy and Grahame, the imperturbable Bond-street Johnnies, with some new repartee that never misses fire, give their unique and amusing interlude with the happiest results": note the mention of Bond Street in the lyrics. Putting these scanty data together, I venture to say that the lost song belonged in fact to that number, perhaps used as an introduction of the two comical Members of Parliament.

[I should also mention that "Cholly" and "Dolly" are also the nicknames of Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins in Bernard Shaw's 1905 play Major Barbara, but this doesn't seem to be related, except perhaps as inspiration for the names of Guy and Grahame's characters.]

The duo are completely forgotten now, and there seems to be so little information preserved about them that I thought I'd put together here all I have been able to find. From a series of short but uniformly positive contemporary notices we learn that they had teamed up in late 1912 and were a permanent hit until the war broke out. (A paragraph in The Era, June 28, 1913 mentions "the case of Dawson v. Struthers, in which Mr. Guy Struthers, of Guy and Graham, was sued for £30 in respect of an alleged breach of contract by a former partner," so maybe this was not Struthers' first theatrical experience.)

Then Struthers enlisted in 1914. In his "Variety Gossip" column (The Era, November 11, 1914), "The Pilgrim" writes:

I have had some interesting news from Lieut. Guy Struthers (of Guy and Graham), who was with the Marines and Naval Brigade at Antwerp. He tells me that the force was well equipped, and delayed the German occupation of the town long enough to enable the Belgian Army to get clear to Ostend.
He was under shell and rifle fire for two days in the trenches, but managed to escape injury. Luckily, the German shooting was most inaccurate, especially their rifle fire. He hopes to return to the halls as soon as the war is over.

But his luck did not hold. In The Stage Year Book for 1916 we read: "The Harvester of Death has been very busy during 1915, and many well-known names are in the list of those who have begun the great adventure. [...] Lieut. Guy Struthers (one of the partners in Guy and Graham) died in London from the effect of wounds received in the Dardanelles." A medal that came up for auction in 2011 gives more details: "Lieutenant Guy Struthers Perkins of Royal Marine Light Infantry, Deal Bn., R.N. Div. died on 23rd November 1915 and is buried in Camberwell Old Cemetery." This in turn leads to his page in Find a Grave, where we find that he was born in 1885 and married in 1909 among other details, but nothing about his career on the stage.

I don't know if or when Guy Grahame enlisted, but in any case he survived to have a career in musical comedy. The Era for May 21, 1919 says:

That clever comedian, Guy Graham, was in town recently, following his engagement in "Ocean Waves." Our readers will recall the brilliant double act of Guy and Grahame, and that Lieut. Guy Struthers made the great sacrifice early in the war. Mr. Graham is seeking another partner for his appearance in variety, when we are promised a show somewhat different from the former act. We understand that Mr. Graham will next be seen in "Mr. Manhattan," which starts at Southampton on June 30.

Some shows where we hear his name accompanied by particularly high praise are "Oh, Joy!" (1919), "It's All Wrong" (1921), "Bluff" (1921) and "Humor and Skills" (1928).

The Motion Picture Studio, November 26, 1921

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This, then, is all I have managed to collect about the song and its (probable) authors. Perhaps there is more out there, but the fact that the song hasn't turned up in a search through several music sheet databases suggests that it was never published, and may be permanently lost.