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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Keeping it from Harold, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Morality and Hypocrisy
Class and Social Status
Pride
Summary
Analysis
The simple-minded, good-natured, and whole-heartedly domestic Jane Bramble is darning a sock while her ten-year-old son Harold Bramble studies. Harold asks his mother to help him with his recitation by looking at a poem while he reads it aloud it from memory. Regarding him with great satisfaction, “like a sheep surprised while gloating over its young,” Jane replies, “Mother will hear you, precious.” Harold doesn’t think his mother’s baby-talk is appropriate for addressing “a young man” who is the school spelling champion. While staring at the glass chandelier above, Harold delivers his verse “with the toneless rapidity affected by youths of his age when reciting poetry.”
Jane’s devotion to her family is plainly apparent in her pride in Harold and her absorption in household duties. She takes her maternal adoration over the top, however, and Wodehouse harshly likens her to a mindless gloating “sheep.” Harold silently objects to his mother’s condescending manner, reminding readers of his conscious pride in himself. He contemplates the chandelier through his spectacles as he recites his poem, suggesting that his refined surroundings correspond to his exceptional intellect. However, his recitation is comically rushed, indicating that he is not so perfect, after all; his excellence is partially in his parents’ heads.
Active
Themes
Jane urges Harold to take a break before moving on to study his Scripture and go for a walk. He obeys and leaves. After he exits, she reflects on his model behavior and intelligence. Harold’s perfection compels both Jane and Harold’s father, Bill, to lie to their son about Bill’s (as of yet unnamed) profession. This hadn’t been a problem when Harold was a baby, but as he grew up and his exceptional virtues quickly became apparent, Jane suggested to her husband that they hide the truth of Bill’s occupation. Though lying is distasteful to them both, they feel “there are times when truth must be sacrificed.”
Harold’s parents also take his devotion to learning his Scripture as evidence of his exceptional character. Harold’s perfection, in turn, justifies their ongoing deception regarding Bill’s career. Wodehouse stokes readers’ curiosity about what such an objectionable career could be by emphasizing how Harold’s remarkable qualities of virtue and intelligence are completely incompatible with Bill’s line of work.
Active
Themes
Harold has already won two prizes in Sunday School, and the local clergy echoes Jane’s suggestion about keeping the truth of Bill’s job from the boy for his own good. Jane’s brother, Major Percy Stokes of the Salvation Army, also steers the Brambles towards deceiving their son when he stops by the house for supper, insisting that it’s “the least” they can do. Jane takes offense to Percy’s preaching about “men of wrath” while he enjoys a meal at the Brambles’ expense. While pompous Percy is said by some to simply love the sound of his own voice, he can nonetheless preach so persuasively he once convinced a pub owner to donate all his property to the poor—starting with his beer.
Active
Themes
Bill easily agrees to conceal his career, being a mild and obliging man at heart. Before Harold was born, he’d readily allowed Jane to choose the baby’s name despite his own preferences. It is near impossible to not like Bill, yet “his walk in life [is] of such a nature that it simply had to be kept from Harold.” The trouble is that Bill is a “professional pugilist.” He had formerly been quite proud of his boxing skills, supposedly able to beat anyone in his weight class in a twenty-round contest. He had even carried around a number of news clippings testifying to his impressive accomplishments. However, after Harold was born, Bill shunned the publicity he once enjoyed, being too afraid that Harold would read about his father in the papers and be ashamed.
Active
Themes
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Harold is especially intelligent compared to his rather witless parents. So intelligent is Harold, in fact, that Bill and Jane are intimidated by him, considering him to be of a “superior order.” He excels in both his academics at a private school and his religious studies, singing in the church choir and attending Sunday School. Given these superior virtues, his parents feel bound to pretend that Bill has a reputable job as a commercial traveler, or salesman, rather than admit the truth: that he is merely a coarse athlete, known as “Young Porky.” Harold, “a self-centred child,” doesn’t question this story.
Jane, still darning socks, thinks happily of Bill’s plans to retire after his next big match and apply for a respectable and comfortable job as an instructor instead. Suddenly her brother and husband arrive, unexpectedly interrupting her reverie. When she questions why Bill isn’t training at his gym, the White Hart, Percy babbles about “wrestling with Bill” and being “vouchsafed the victory,” while Jane expresses her confusion and disdain. Percy says he sent letters and pamphlets to Bill and tried to talk to him in person to dissuade him from boxing, but was threatened by Bill’s trainer, Jerry Fisher. He asks Bill which treatise finally turned him away from “the primrose path” of sinfulness, but Bill maintains that it was what Percy wrote about Harold that changed his mind, rather than any of Percy’s treatises.
Active
Themes
Jane still doesn’t understand what’s going on and demands a straight answer from Bill. Finally, Bill admits that he isn’t going to fight next week. Jane asks him what about the money he was supposed to earn from the match, and Percy scoffs at the question. She reminds her brother that she has lent him enough money in the past. She tells Bill that she’s never liked his career, but it’s earned them good money and allowed them to give Harold a superior education. The earnings from the upcoming fight were supposed to guarantee Harold a better start in life than his parents had.
Jane starts to cry as Bill explains that he is thinking of Harold, and how he decided not to fight after Percy pointed out that the big match-up with the American Jimmy Murphy would likely be covered by the major newspapers with his picture, and Harold would see it and realize the truth.
Just then Jerry walks in and rushes toward Percy. Percy dives under the table “like a performing seal” while Bill and Jane tell Jerry not to act so rudely. Jerry manages to restrain himself while he pleads with Bill to come back to the gym. Bill tells Percy to explain everything to Jerry, and Percy tells Jane to do it. Jane refuses, and Bill finally confesses again that he’s not going to fight. Jerry urges Bill to consider the money, the crowds, the publicity, the title he can contend for if he wins—as well as Jerry’s own reputation as a trainer—but Bill refuses.
Active
Themes
Suddenly Harold returns from his walk, and a furious Jerry seeks revenge on Bill by telling the boy the truth about his father. Bill and Percy try to cut him off, but he talks over them. Bill and Percy tell Harold not to be ashamed because Bill has quit boxing forever, no matter who should plead with him to reconsider—not even the King of England could persuade him to dishonor his son.
Active
Themes
Harold unexpectedly demands to know what will happen to his bet on the match if Bill quits. He declares that it’s quite unfair for his father to spoil his bet after all the research he’s done about boxing. Harold also says it’s unfair of his father to have kept this secret from him all this time, since the other boys would have fallen all over him if they had known who his father was, instead of looking down on him as “Goggles.” He urges his father not to withdraw from the match.
Active
Themes
Jerry praises Harold’s response, and the boy explains that he and his friends have followed boxing for years. Another boy supposedly owns a photo of a boxing champion, and Harold begs his father for a picture of him boxing so he can flaunt it, too, and put an end to the nickname “Goggles.” Jerry and Bill return to the gym, and Harold resumes practicing his recitation with Jane.
