A Man of Means: Summary & Reading Guide

One man, six fortunes and two collaborators

A Man of Means is an unusually coherent item among these mixed-collection shelves. The six episodes follow Roland Bleke, a clerk whose changes of fortune bring a fresh difficulty each time. Wodehouse wrote them with C. H. Bovill. They appeared in the British Strand from April to September 1914, with American periodical versions later, but a British book had to wait until Porpoise Books issued the sequence in 1991. The page’s 1991 year means first collected book form, not that Wodehouse sat down to create the episodes decades after Jeeves had arrived. I keep the coauthor beside him: a fan catalogue should not quietly erase Bovill.

The opening “The Episode of the Landlady’s Daughter” establishes the comic trap. Roland’s engagement to Muriel Coppin has been made more by social momentum than settled intention, and a change in salary seems to offer him an escape. Money promptly complicates the plan. The pleasure of the sequence lies in how a solution to one immediate predicament becomes the source of another. Roland does not reset to an anonymous protagonist after each episode. His fortunes and the reader’s understanding of him accumulate, even though each installment has a shape suited to magazine publication.

From there the episode titles themselves give a route through shifting worlds: “The Financial Napoleon,” “The Theatrical Venture,” “The Live Weekly,” “The Exiled Monarch” and “The Hired Past.” They mark movements through business, theatrical ambition, journalism and the social consequences of new resources. I would read them in their original sequence, because Roland’s continuing position gives the collection a stronger arc than an anthology of unrelated tales. The page’s alphabetized story index is a lookup tool; it is not an instruction to scramble a connected narrative. This is one of Wodehouse’s early demonstrations that a recurring figure can hold separate comic contraptions together.

The textual trail adds another reason to be exact. Neil Midkiff records the 1991 book as based on Strand texts; the American Pictorial Review printings use different headings and sometimes shorten a piece or add small passages. A collector holding a modern ebook should not assume it reproduces precisely one American periodical run merely because the plot is recognisable. The two early publication channels and the later book are separate manifestations. The coauthored nature of the work is also visible in specialist bibliographies and in the British National Bibliography’s record for the Porpoise volume.

Roland is an appealing subject because good luck is not always comfortable. A windfall can remove one obstacle while making everyone around him newly confident about what he ought to do next. That pressure anticipates one of Wodehouse’s abiding pleasures: a mild man confronted by forceful advice, with the audience allowed to see several incompatible futures before he can. I would not call Roland an early Bertie or Ukridge in disguise. He has his own continuous story and his own collaborator’s contribution behind the page. Comparisons to later comic types are invitations to notice technique, not identities.

For a first visit, begin at the landlady’s daughter and follow the six episodes through. For a companion shelf, the combined Kid Brady Stories and A Man of Means reprints this sequence alongside a separate early sporting run. The 1991 Porpoise book remains the first collected British edition of Roland’s adventures; the 2013/14 combined volume is a later republication. Distinguishing those dates makes the experience more satisfying. It is possible to enjoy an early, linked comic experiment without pretending it entered Wodehouse’s book catalogue in the year it first reached a magazine.