Keeping it from Harold Study Guide

P. G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 in Guildford, Surrey, England. He attended Dulwich College for secondary school before starting work at a bank in London. While working as a junior banker, he published 80 articles and stories in two years. After securing a newspaper columnist position and publishing his first novel, he left the bank to write full-time. He began his career writing public-school stories and light romances before turning to farce, his specialty. While most of his fiction is set in England, Wodehouse spent much of his life in the U.S. and France. In 1940, he was captured in France by the Nazis and interned for nearly a year. In 1941 he made several radio broadcasts from Germany to the U.S., giving a humorous account of his imprisonment and subtly making fun of his German captors. These broadcasts over German radio provoked extreme controversy in Britain, and many of Wodehouse’s fellow countrymen never forgave him. He moved to the U.S. permanently after the war. Wodehouse was prolific, publishing more than 90 books throughout his life and authoring or collaborating on more than 50 film scripts, plays, and musical comedies.

The story was first published in 1913, the year before WWI would begin and change the course of history. In this moment, however, relations among the European powers were better than they had been at the turn of the century and war was not inevitable. In May 1913, King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia all reunited warmly in Berlin to celebrate the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter. These monarchs were still popular, and the latter two still ruled their countries; the King and Queen of England were also still the Emperor and Empress of India. Though during and after the war many monarchies would fall, in 1913 much of Europe was still relaxed, optimistic, and confident of standing in the center of the world. The social transformations that followed WWI—including women’s suffrage, a revolution in domestic life, and the upheaval of the class system—had yet to come, as can be seen in Wodehouse’s portrayal of the Bramble family, who employ domestic servants, wouldn’t dream of Jane working after marriage, and worry chiefly about how Bill’s profession reflects on their social standing.

Contemporaries of Wodehouse in the Edwardian Period, named for King Edward VII and spanning from Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 to the outbreak of WWI in 1914, included George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster (A Passage to India, A Room with a View). Like Wodehouse, these writers reflected and commented on England’s social conditions at the height of the British Empire, when the material luxuries enjoyed by the rich contrasted strikingly with the squalid conditions experienced by four-fifths of the English population. Other masters of Wodehouse’s specific style of camp include Max Beerbohm and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Among Wodehouse’s literary predecessors, meanwhile, are Ben Johnson and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest). The poem that Harold recites to his mother is variously titled “A Farewell” or “One Grand Sweet Song,” by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), an English clergyman, novelist, and historian. The poem was published in 1856.