"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.

As far as I know, there is no positive evidence to answer the question one way or another, in the form of a clear, unambiguous statement by one of the parties involved (writer or editor). On one hand, Wodehouse the writer did keep in his early years a record of "Money Received for Literary Work" which has been examined to exhaustion by scholars. While a few obscure items in it are yet to be tracked down, it certainly doesn't contain an entry that could correspond to this one. But a non-commercial magazine like the Malvernian wouldn't normally offer payment for contributions, most of which are volunteered by current and former school members, and so "Money Received" would not necessarily have anything to say about it. (I believe it does not contain entries for PGW's many contributions to his own school magazine, the Alleynian.) On the other hand, the magazine may or may not have kept a record of authors, but in any case this is not available to me.

Internal evidence is always tricky. It comes down to how "Wodehousian" one feels the article is, in terms of style, quality and subject matter, always taking into account the very early date. This can only be a subjective appreciation. For my part, I wouldn't have any problem believing this piece is authentic on its own merits: cricket in general, and even village cricket, feature prominently in PGW's articles and stories in the 1900s. A few references and turns of phrase can be linked to specific passages in contemporary works, such as "Charles, his friend," whose "conversational powers are limited to a raucous laugh:" compare "The other youth was apparently of the 'Charles-his-friend' variety, content to look on and applaud, and generally play chorus to his companion's 'lead.'" (The Manoeuvres of Charteris). [Although the "Charles his friend" figure is not Wodehouse's own creation. There may be a future blog topic on this one.] Arthur R. has pointed out others, like "airy badinage" (found in Love Among the Chickens), "a very present help in time of trouble" (used in "The Comeback of Battling Billson") or "villagers and retainers" (in The Head of Kay's). None of these are exclusive to Wodehouse, but they add up. The last one is especially strong, because in the novel the phrase seems to be associated with the last type described in the article: "I'm going to play 'villagers and retainers' to your 'hero'" (although in context the speaker isn't really thinking in terms of cricket.)

The mention of "a weak 'Colts' Eleven" is also interesting, because to the best of my knowledge Wodehouse only ever used "Colts" in this sense ("A young or inexperienced person, a 'green hand'; now in Sport (orig. Cricket), a young or inexperienced player; a member of a junior team; also in pl., the team itself" according to the OED) in his articles about Malvern College that I will comment on later. Finally, the use of classical references (Æsculapius, profanum vulgus) and "Stageland" (theatrical) language are also Wodehousean traits.

However, it is easy to lose perspective and overlook how much Wodehouse's early style owes to the milieu of the school magazines in which it developed, especially if one's main source of familiarity with that milieu is Wodehouse himself. In other words, there is a risk of viewing specific tropes and expressions as characteristic of the author, when they really are the common stock of school magazine writers. In the course of my research on this piece I came across a number of unsigned articles in the Malvernian for which a case for Wodehouse's authorship could be made based on internal evidence alone. I hope to be able to expand on those in a future post.

The circumstantial evidence is where things get interesting. The main difficulty, of course, of supposing that Wodehouse could have been the author of this piece is that in principle there is little reason why he should be writing for the magazine of a school of which he wasn't a pupil. He contributed regularly to the Alleynian, published by his alma mater Dulwich, until as late as 1939, but to no other school magazine that I know of (not counting, of course, the Public School Magazine, which was a regular commercial publication).

But Wodehouse did have a connection of sorts with Malvern College at that particular time. In 1900 he wrote two articles for the PSM about the College: "Cricket at Malvern" (September) and the longer "Malvern College" (November), both available at Madame Eulalie. They are introductions to Malvern's history, customs, architecture, and above all sports. They show that he spent time at the College collecting material, exploring the grounds and interviewing the natives. [There is a much earlier connection as well. He once wrote to the author of A History of Malvern College 1865-1965: "When I was a small boy, I used to spend part of the summer holidays with an uncle who was Vicar of Upton-on-Severn, and I played a lot of boys' cricket, some of it on the Malvern ground. From those early days, the place fascinated me" (Wodehouse at the Wicket, pp. 199-200).] 

One may speculate (but only speculate) that during his visit to the College he made the acquaintance of the Malvernian editor and was eventually invited to contribute a short piece to the magazine. That he knew the editor is at least certain. The October 1900 issue contains this brief note concerning the second of Wodehouse's articles:

An article is appearing in the November number of the Public School Magazine, entitled "Malvern College." It is profusely illustrated, principally by amateur photographs taken by Malvernians, and boasts as frontispiece a signed photograph of the Headmaster. This article derives peculiar interest from the fact that it is written not by a professional journalist, nor by anyone connected with the school, but by the ex-Editor of the Alleynian. His criticism upon the Malvernian is interesting, and both is, and is likely to be, thoroughly justified by the facts of the case. The Malvernian, says he, "is fairly good, as school magazines go!" The school magazine consists of a conglomeration of facts concerning the School which, with perhaps unconscious irony, the editor is wont to describe as "news." He is also permitted to insert now and then an article of "literary merit," such as, for instance, a dissertation on the "Leonids," or a description of how fish are caught in Norway. As the School Library possesses a copy of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," it would be superfluous and presumptuous to try to improve upon it; and waste of time to write what is never read. If the standard of interest is to be raised, the canons should be more liberal than they are.

This was written before the second PSM article appeared, and the phrase on the Malvernian did not make it into the published version, which devotes its last paragraph to the magazine and its current editor. The conclusion is that the editor must have seen it in an earlier draft, and his response to it may have caused Wodehouse to delete or rephrase it. In the November issue we find the editor handsomely acknowledging the change:

The Public School Magazine has at length appeared, in which is published the article on Malvern College. While not pretending to be absolutely exhaustive, the letterpress gives much interesting information in a pleasant manner, and is only equalled by the excellence of the illustrations. But nowhere do we perceive the criticism on the Malvernian, so confidently predicted in October. We must offer apologies to the Editor of the P. S. M. We had excellent reason for believing that this remark would appear, and it speaks volumes for Mr. Wodebouse's charity that he did not allow it to go to press.

The next step is to find another candidate, someone whose initials matched "P.G.W." and was likely to contribute to the magazine at the time. I browsed all the issues for several years preceding and following 1901 without finding anyone even partially suitable. Another wonderful resource available at the Malvern website is the collection of College Registers with complete information about everyone who attended the school, with dates, family, background and accomplishments. Again, nobody with these initials was a student at Malvern between 1891 and 1901.

[Curiously enough, the place was full of Wodehouses. Two brothers, William Stanley and Charles Edward, sons of W. H. Wodehouse of Woolmers Park, Hertford, attended Malvern between 1865 and 1872. Then six sons of the second were there between 1897 and 1912, from Sydney Herbert Wodehouse, 1897-1900, to Frederick Guy de Picquigny Wodehouse, 1908-1911. There was even a P. G. (Percy George) Wodehouse, but he could hardly be the candidate I was looking for, since he was born in 1888 and only entered the College in 1903. This overpopulation of Wodehouses makes the task of searching for ours through the issues of the Malvernian difficult, since they keep popping up in cricket and other reports.

At the end of his second article, our PGW thanks "Mr. Bullock, for the very kind way in which they assisted me in preparing this article." This must be E. C. Bullock, a housemaster at Malvern who may have acted as cicerone during Wodehouse's visit. Bullock's House had opened in 1898, and in 1900 was home to the second of the six Wodehouse brothers I mentioned before. All later representatives of the family went to Bullock's too. It may be guessed that Mr. Bullock noticed the coincidence and asked our PGW if they were any relations.]

The author could also be an Old Malvernian, although contributions by these usually have "O.M." added to their signatures. But there is a bit of evidence to the contrary in the epigraph "A chiel's amang ye takin' notes," which is a well-known line from the poem "On The Late Captain Grose's Peregrinations Thro' Scotland" by the poet Burns:

Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots,
Frae Maidenkirk to Johny Groats;—
If there's a hole in a' your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chiel's amang ye takin' notes,
And, faith, he'll prent it.

["Listen up, Scotland, and brother Scots, / From Maidenkirk to John o' Groats; / If there's a hole in any of your coats, / I advise you to fix it: / A guy is among you taking notes, / And, in faith, he'll print it."]

Burns wrote this poem for the English antiquarian Francis Grose (1731-1791), whom he met in 1789 when Grose was touring the country collecting materials for his Antiquities of Scotland. It was first published in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on August 11, 1789 under the title "Address to the People of Scotland, respecting Francis Grose, Esq." and then collected in the 1793 edition of Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect with its new title. It is a humorous warning to his countrymen that there is a stranger in their midst taking notes that will be presented to the world at large, so they had better fix or at least hide any flaws they don't want to see publicized. It is often quoted accompanying travel notes and similar works where the author puts down his or her impressions of foreign parts.

The implication for the piece under discussion is that the writer is not local (a current student, a staff member, or an O.M.) but a "foreigner," and outsider visiting the school with the express purpose of writing about it. This however does not apply to the subject matter of the piece (country cricket, not Malvern-related), but fits admirably Wodehouse's commision by the PSM of writing his two articles, his own Antiquities of Malvern.

———

This is all the evidence, either positive (mostly negative), internal or circumstantial I've been able to collect concerning the possibility that the article was written by P. G. Wodehouse. I don't believe it is conclusive but, putting it all in the balance, I'm inclined to think the article is genuine. Still, I would like to see further evidence. Meanwhile, there are a few unsigned articles in the Malvernian from 1900 which deserve attention, but which I have to leave for the subject of another post.

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.

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.