Monday, November 18, 2024

Edwardian!

     The world of which I have been writing ever since I was so high, the world of the Drones Club and the lads who congregate there, was always a small world - one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say. It was bounded on the east by St. James's Street, on the west by Hyde Park Corner, by Oxford Street on the north and by Piccadilly on the south. And now it is not even small, it is non-existent. It has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it.

    This is pointed out to me every time a new book of mine dealing with the Drones Club of Jeeves and Bertie is published in England. "Edwardian!" the critics hiss at me. (It is not easy to hiss the word Edwardian, containing as it does no sibilant, but they manage it.)

(from the Preface to Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

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