Dandyism in its more frivolous sense is continuously present in the minor and popular literature of 1890-1914, as though the differences between Victorian and Edwardian felt in the upper literary atmosphere were scarcely registered in these lower depths. The undergraduate hero of Benson’s The Babe, B.A.: Being the Uneventful History of a Young Gentleman at the University of Cambridge (1897) is the ancestor of Saki’s graceful and infuriating young men Clovis Sangrail in The Chronicles of Clovis and Bassington in The Unbearable Bassington (both 1912). P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith, the upper-class anarchist who is expelled from Eton, is of the same mould.
Indeed, in Wodehouse’s work the dandy, already an 1890s survival into the Edwardian world, was perpetuated for much of the twentieth century. His schoolboy stories of the Edwardian period are taken by Orwell, rightly I think, as works of a precocious maturity in which Wodehouse remained stuck for the rest of his long life […].
Psmith’s characteristics are faintly reminiscent of Stalky’s in Stalky and Co., physical courage, disregard of the rules, tribal solidarity and cunning. But unlike Kipling’s schoolboys, who are capable of complex emotions (Stalky’s sense of personal affront in ‘The Flag of Their Country’, for example), Wodehouse’s figures are capable only of aggression. The dominant motif of the dialogue is the insult, of which there are many good examples. One of the boys says of his adolescent moustache: ‘Heaps of people tell me I ought to have it waxed’. ‘What it really needs is a top-dressing with guano’, replies Psmith […]. Psmith becomes the central figure of the first Wodehouse novel to have an adult setting, Psmith in the City (1910). After the Great War Psmith splits into two: his effortless social superiority becomes an attribute of Bertie Wooster, his guile and know-how become characteristics of the indispensable Jeeves.
John Bachelor, “Edwardian Literature,” Edwardian and Georgian Fiction (ed. Harold Bloom).
Rather missing the point, I think. The context of the “top-dressing” comment is in a conversation between Psmith and an old schoolmate for whom he feels contempt (and who knows too much about his past). He’s been separated from his usual friend and listener for the morning and thrown into the company of Dunster, who interrupts constantly and is not a good audience--naturally he’s in a particularly snarky mood.
If you really read these books, there is complex emotion present. It’s usually downplayed or below the surface, though. Psmith is not just a trial run for the preferred-by-critics Jeeves and Wooster (and he did indeed make a last appearance after the War, in 1923); he’s an enigmatic character in his own right. Aggression isn’t the half of it.
(And Psmith in the City was not Wodehouse’s first novel with an adult setting; this distinction goes to Love among the Chickens, originally published in 1906.)
