If I Were You: Summary & Reading Guide

A baronet, a barber and an inconvenient nursery secret

Anthony, fifth Earl of Droitwich, is expected to marry Violet, the daughter of a millionaire. The engagement has been arranged to satisfy family finances rather than his heart. Tony has fallen for Polly Brown, a manicurist whom his relations do not regard as a future countess. Then a revelation by his old nurse raises a question about whether he and the barber Syd Price were switched in infancy. The premise could be played as solemn melodrama. Wodehouse instead uses it to ask what these people will do when a social identity that everyone has treated as fixed suddenly seems open to dispute.

Tony’s choice to leave for London with Polly is one of the novel’s invigorating turns. The family’s preferred match does not survive simply because it has been announced. Polly brings resourcefulness to a situation in which Tony has been protected by position and constrained by it at the same time. Syd, a Socialist barber, is invited into the ancestral house as a possible replacement. The mismatch between his politics and the assumptions of the people who live there promises more than a joke about a man out of place. It tests how much of aristocratic life is performance, habit or inherited authority.

The nurse’s disclosure is a comic device with real consequences for how others behave. A person who was previously spoken to as an earl may be evaluated as a barber, and a barber may be addressed as though a title could alter every opinion he holds. The novel is alert to those rapid recalculations. Tony and Syd are not merely tokens on two sides of an exchange; their relationships and convictions do not evaporate when somebody proposes a new genealogy. I find that the most entertaining way to read the story: watch each member of the household react to the possibility before deciding how the matter must end.

Violet’s engagement deserves to be understood as a financial and social arrangement made by families. Polly’s position is different because Tony chooses her in the face of those arrangements. That contrast is not a license to flatten either woman into an emblem. Wodehouse uses the prospective marriages to make class prejudice visible in practical decisions: who is invited, who is assumed suitable and whose opinion is treated as an inconvenience. Romance and a possible identity reversal put those assumptions under pressure without turning the book into a treatise. The comic tone depends on how quickly solemn declarations can be overtaken by fresh information.

This novel came from a play of the same name by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. The specialist bibliography reports that the play was published but not performed, and that the prose was serialised in the American Magazine and the Daily Mail before the books. Doubleday, Doran issued the US novel on 3 September 1931, followed by Herbert Jenkins in the UK on 25 September. An adaptation history should keep the collaborative play, magazine versions and Wodehouse novel distinct. The original dramatic premise helps explain the concentration of people whose positions can be rearranged within one household.

The material had another stage life as Who’s Who?, re-adapted by Wodehouse and Bolton and first performed in London in September 1934. Peter Haddon played Tony and Ivor Barnard Syd Price. A later musical treatment, Who’s Who, Baby?, belongs to the same lineage, though a name on a programme is no substitute for identifying who wrote each version. These are useful signposts for a reader intrigued by the source and transformations of the story. They are not grounds for treating a performance text as the first book edition or for assuming that the novel reproduces the stage dialogue.

The switch-at-birth idea is familiar enough that the pleasure lies in its handling. A serious family might demand proof and prepare legal arguments. These characters must also get through meals, engagements and everyday instructions while the supposed order of the house is unstable. The people who most insist on rank have the hardest time deciding how to address a man who may or may not hold it. Syd’s political views do not automatically make him master of the house, and Tony’s affection for Polly does not wait politely for the family to solve its genealogy. Every personal preference acquires a new setting.

Read If I Were You for Wodehouse in a class comedy with a theatrical pulse. Its central question is wonderfully simple, but the reactions to it create a busy, particular novel. I return for Polly’s resourcefulness and for the sight of several confident social judgments being tested in public. If you are building a bibliography, keep the 1931 novel, its earlier collaborative play and the later Who’s Who? production in separate records. If you are choosing an evening’s reading, begin with Tony’s impractical engagement and wait for the nurse to make it considerably more impractical.

The question of what a title does to a person is never answered by a change of clothes alone. Tony has his own wishes before the nurse speaks, and Syd arrives with ideas formed in a different occupation. Their possible exchange reveals the assumptions of everyone who surrounds them. That social reaction is the real show: the household exposes itself as it tries to decide whether birth should dictate character, affection and the right to choose a future.