Nothing Serious: Summary & Reading Guide

A late collection with a mischievous title

Nothing Serious sounds like a promise to send the reader home untroubled, but Wodehouse takes each character’s small crisis seriously enough to make the misunderstanding count. Herbert Jenkins issued ten stories in Britain on 21 July 1950; Doubleday followed in America on 24 May 1951. Here the original UK and US contents agree, a welcome simplification after the regional reshuffling of Young Men in Spats and Eggs, Beans and Crumpets. Agreement on selection does not establish that every earlier magazine version has identical wording, nor does it mean all ten pieces followed one publication path.

Five belong to the Oldest Member’s golfing world. “Up from the Depths,” “Feet of Clay,” “Excelsior,” “Rodney Has a Relapse” and “Tangled Hearts” work as individual cases rather than chapters of a tournament. A game becomes an occasion for advice about love, pride and the danger of believing one understands another person's heart. The Oldest Member’s storytelling frame lets a sporting anecdote acquire the shape of a moral fable, even when its moral is comically fragile. I give each story a little space: the conversation after a round can be as revealing as a shot on the course.

The book then moves into other Wodehouse neighbourhoods. “Birth of a Salesman” provides a Blandings connection, while “Success Story” returns to Ukridge. “The Shadow Passes” and “Bramley Is So Bracing” offer Drones company and had already appeared in the American Eggs, Beans and Crumpets. It was also Wodehouse’s final contribution to the British Strand magazine. Nothing Serious is a junction of familiar shelves, not a new ten-part series. Its position among this library’s mixed collections is an honest convenience; a book can make several fictional communities available without belonging wholly to any one of them.

Three stories, “The Shadow Passes,” “Up from the Depths” and “How’s That, Umpire?,” had not previously appeared in print according to Terry Mordue’s bibliography. That is distinct from the other pieces, which circulated in magazines or books before this gathering. One can welcome a new 1950 volume and still acknowledge earlier public lives for many of its components. A collector seeking story first appearances needs a finer map than the book dates alone. The story index gives collection trails represented here, while the specialist bibliography supplies the magazine history.

Several magazine names differ from the book titles. “Feet of Clay” appeared as “A Slightly Broken Romance”; “Excelsior” as “The Hazards of Horace Bewstridge”; “Success Story” as “Ukie Invests in Human Nature.” These are variants, not extra missing entries in the book’s contents. An unfamiliar heading on a periodical scan may thus lead back to a familiar story. The short form lets each fresh piece begin with a fresh confident promise. After several rounds of golf, the move to Blandings or Ukridge changes the voice and stakes while keeping that comic optimism in play.

Begin with a golf story for the Oldest Member’s voice, then use “Birth of a Salesman” or “Success Story” as a door to another shelf. For an edition hunter, the two original regional books have the same ten selections. For a story historian, the magazine names, three first printings and earlier American collection appearance of “Bramley Is So Bracing” still make a layered history. The title’s modest reassurance conceals a fine map of how Wodehouse kept his comic worlds in circulation, one self-contained predicament at a time.