Big Money: Summary & Reading Guide

Biscuit and Berry make ambitious plans for solvency

Lord Biskerton, known as Biscuit, has the social standing of an earl’s heir and a strong wish to avoid the disgrace of work. His friend Berry Conway has taken a job as secretary to the wealthy and dyspeptic American T. Paterson Frisby. Between them stand a shortage of ready money, the attractions of Ann Moon, Frisby’s niece, and the determined activities of Aunt Vera. This is a comedy about people who think a marriage can rescue a household’s finances. I enjoy the way every calculation is liable to be unsettled by a person who has not consented to play the assigned part.

Biscuit and Berry make a pleasingly uneven pair. One has a title in prospect and a profound reluctance to earn; the other has already had to accept employment. Their friendship does not erase that difference. Berry sees Frisby close at hand, and the millionaire’s care for every cent makes the secretary’s position a useful vantage point on money and power. Biscuit can imagine an elegant solution from the outside. Wodehouse uses their competing perspectives to keep a financial scheme from becoming a dry account of assets and debts. What a character can afford to say depends partly on who pays him.

Ann Moon is central because her expected inheritance tempts people to treat her as an entry in a ledger. Her beauty is remarked upon, but the social arrangements being made around her have a practical purpose for the families involved. Aunt Vera is experienced in advancing a romantic campaign and has interests of her own. When she tries to arrange more than one profitable engagement for the House of Hoddesdon, the arithmetic grows gloriously unstable. A Wodehouse romance works best when the supposed prize can make choices; the humour here arises from the plans of people who assume that a large fortune will simplify those choices.

Frisby’s wealth makes him an obvious figure to court or evade, yet his temperament prevents him from being a passive bank account. A rich uncle who loves his money is quite capable of upsetting an arrangement intended to make somebody else comfortable. That creates a comic contest in which no participant entirely controls the resources or the information. I like watching a plan for permanent security depend on a casual conversation, a secret intention or a relative’s mood. The word big in the title promises a scale that the characters’ immediate worries often undercut.

The novel was first published as a US book by Doubleday, Doran on 30 January 1931. Herbert Jenkins issued the British edition on 20 March. Before either book, readers could follow magazine serials in Collier’s and the Strand. These are separate publication events, not evidence of a second plot. The specialist bibliography also notes a return to Valley Fields and its estate agent Mr Cornelius, first met in Sam the Sudden. That is an enjoyable thread for readers who like tracing Wodehouse’s lesser-recognized recurring people through otherwise independent novels.

Berry’s job distinguishes this from stories about an entirely leisured set. A secretary is paid to be near someone who may be difficult, and his professional obligation can interfere with the liberty to declare exactly what he wants. Biscuit’s aversion to work is funny in a different register. His plans are made from a position of inherited expectation, though those expectations are themselves financially strained. The two friends’ proposed routes to solvency invite us to compare effort, charm, luck and the improvised bargains that a family may call sensible. Wodehouse keeps the comparison light by turning each possible solution into a new complication.

Aunt Vera’s expertise is another highlight. She has seen enough of the marriage market to play more than one line at a time. That confidence can be admirable as technique and alarming to anyone whose feelings are being managed. Her interference links the apparently separate dilemmas of Biscuit and Berry, giving the book its busy social texture. I return to the scenes in which people believe they have reached a tidy agreement, only to discover that somebody else has been arranging a different future simultaneously. The comedy lies in the collision of plans that are all plausible from their planners’ limited viewpoints.

Take Big Money from the shelf when you want a Wodehouse novel about financial desperation presented in evening dress. There are no lessons on investment and no need to know the Blandings or Jeeves worlds. The fun is in the contrast between enormous sums and small human uncertainties: who loves whom, who can afford to refuse, who knows the newest plan and who will speak at the worst possible moment. Biscuit and Berry make a companionable pair through it all. If their schemes seem foolproof at breakfast, wait until Aunt Vera and Mr Frisby have had an opportunity to respond.

The title’s promise can be read from more than one seat at the table. For Biscuit, money is a way out of employment; for Berry, it may change what his job permits; for Frisby, it is something to guard. Ann must live with the uses to which other people put her expected fortune. These competing meanings make the book richer than a single joke about marrying an heiress and give the various negotiations their comic friction.