Mr Mulliner Speaking: Summary & Reading Guide

A second round, with a few surprising ancestors

Mr Mulliner Speaking brings the Anglers’ Rest storyteller back for nine more tales. The format is familiar: a thought voiced near him becomes an occasion for the history of a Mulliner relative. The pleasure is not in predicting which branch of the family tree he will select. It is in hearing how confidently he will make that branch illuminate the subject before the company. The book expands the range of predicaments while retaining the conversational frame that made Meet Mr Mulliner so hospitable. I often recommend it once a reader has found the narrator’s cadence, because this volume also reveals how adaptable Wodehouse considered a story’s identity to be.

“The Reverent Wooing of Archibald” begins with a character whose remarkable talent for imitating a hen is one of the family’s less conventional social assets. “The Man Who Gave Up Smoking,” “The Story of Cedric” and “The Ordeal of Osbert Mulliner” follow other problems of habit, personality and courtship. “Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court” and “Those in Peril on the Tee” take the family into yet more varied territory. The final three stories — “Something Squishy,” “The Awful Gladness of the Mater” and “The Passing of Ambrose” — deserve special attention because their earlier magazine versions were Bobby Wickham stories, not originally Mulliner tales. Wodehouse refitted them for this book’s frame.

That transformation is a delight for a textual enthusiast and a potential trap for a simplistic reading list. A magazine character or narrator may differ from the version in a later collection. “Those in Peril on the Tee” has a different kind of background: its magazine version was narrated by the Oldest Member, the voice associated with Wodehouse’s golf stories. The book’s Mr Mulliner frame gives it a new company. It would be wrong to state without qualification that every tale was conceived as a Mulliner story at first publication. The collected volume has a coherent narrative host, while its components disclose a lively history of revision and reassignment. Both facts can stand together.

Herbert Jenkins published the UK book on 30 April 1929. Doubleday, Doran followed in America on 21 February 1930. The stories had appeared in the Strand and various American magazines before the volume. The dates matter because a 1925 periodical story later converted into a Mulliner tale has two different moments in its life. The specialist bibliography identifies the individual titles, magazines and conversion notes. An enthusiast hunting an original appearance should expect a different cast or frame in some cases; someone reading the collected book should expect nine stories narrated in Mr Mulliner’s voice. This is exactly the kind of distinction a fan library can make without spoiling a single joke.

I like how the narrator absorbs such varied material. A golfer’s trouble, a formidable parent and a personal vow can each become evidence of a family characteristic. Mr Mulliner speaks as if the connection were obvious; the very confidence of the bridge is part of the humour. The Anglers’ Rest is a place of company, yet his stories often show individuals struggling to make themselves understood by somebody they hope to impress. The bar audience gets to hear a neat account after the fact. The people within the account must discover their own resourcefulness while the situation is still bewildering.

This second volume is not a novel continuing one set of romantic stakes from the first. Each story has a beginning and an end, and a reader can enter almost anywhere. The sequence nonetheless makes a satisfying shelf: Meet Mr Mulliner sets out the voice, this book develops its flexibility, and Mulliner Nights offers another nine tales. Later collections also carry Mulliner material, so the three principal volumes should be called an initial path rather than the whole family archive. Story links on a site help readers follow a favourite relation across books while respecting the actual contents of each original collection.

The annotations to Mr Mulliner Speaking are useful for the subtleties that would otherwise be easy to miss. Archibald’s hen imitation, for instance, echoes in later Mulliner material. The notes also trace older expressions, references to fashions and the differences between magazine and book versions. My preferred reading method is to let the tale work first. A comic performance loses something if every turn sends me immediately to a footnote. Afterward, the annotations make a second pass richer. They show not merely where Wodehouse found an allusion, but how he adapted the social material of a story to a new speaking voice.

Read the book for the storyteller’s poise and stay for the editorial surprises. It is funny to imagine an Anglers’ Rest customer wondering how an observation about life could possibly summon another Mulliner cousin; it is funnier when the account turns out to fit. The volume also invites a fan to ask what changes when Bobby Wickham or the Oldest Member gives way to Mr Mulliner as the framing presence. That is a question of narrative tone, not just names in a bibliography. Here Wodehouse demonstrates that an excellent comic story can travel, provided the new teller has a way of making it his own.