The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse - by P.G. Wodehouse was the first of the Jeeves novels, although not originally conceived as a single narrative, being assembled from a number of short stories featuring the same characters. The book was first published in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, on 17 May 1923 and in the United States by George H. Doran, New York, on 28 September 1923, under the title Jeeves.
Overview
The novel combined 11 previously published stories, of which the first six and the last were split in two, to make a book of 18 chapters. It is now often printed in 11 chapters, mirroring the original stories.
All the stories had previously appeared in The Strand Magazine in the UK, between December 1921 and November 1922, except for one, "Jeeves and the Chump Cyril", which had appeared in the Strand in August 1918. That story had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (US) in June 1918. All the other stories appeared in Cosmopolitan in the US between December 1921 and December 1922.
This was the second collection of Jeeves stories, after My Man Jeeves (1919); the next collection would be Carry On, Jeeves, in 1925.
All of the short stories are connected and most of them involve Bertie's friend Bingo Little, who is always falling in love.
When either Bertie Wooster or his friends found themselves in the soup or in dangerous proximity to the tureen, the instinct of one and all was to turn to Jeeves - Bertie's Man. He understood human nature, especially that of gilded youth.
It did not matter if the hope of an ancient house had fallen in love with a waitress, or if Bertie's cousins Claude and Eustace had been playing dido; Jeeves never failed. His was a sound brain.
The only thing in which Jeeves failed, that is in his master's eyes, was that he could not always go the whole way with him in the matter of spats, socks and ties, particularly in the Spring - Jeeves was a purist. In this volume are told some of Jeeves more remarkable achievements.
