The Man Upstairs: Summary & Reading Guide

Nineteen experiments before the familiar households

The Man Upstairs is a useful corrective to the idea that a Wodehouse collection must be a chapter in one continuing saga. Methuen published these nineteen stories in London on 23 January 1914. Their first appearances had been scattered through British magazines, and the book gathers them under a title belonging to just one piece. Artists, lovers, school connections and people with a fragile grasp of their prospects make a lively early company. I read it as an opportunity to hear Wodehouse testing how much comic pressure a modest encounter can bear. The cast changes repeatedly, so each new opening is its own invitation.

The title story makes a small physical separation between neighbours into a source of romantic misunderstanding. Other pieces change the social setting and scale. The short form matters: a reader grasps one predicament, enjoys its reversal and starts again with another cast. Wodehouse has not yet built the recurring machinery of Blandings or the Drones Club. The pleasure is in the individual construction, the rhythm of an opening and the way an ordinary embarrassment becomes urgently important to the person enduring it. A story can be satisfying without announcing a future series, and this collection is all the more interesting for showing so many possible directions.

“Archibald’s Benefit” deserves a careful label. It began as the cricket story “Reginald’s Record Knock” in a British magazine; the book version turns its sporting background to golf. That does not make this an Oldest Member volume. Likewise “The Goal-Keeper and the Plutocrat” has a soccer setting, while the earlier American magazine form was the baseball story “The Pitcher and the Plutocrat.” Wodehouse adapted the comic mechanism to a different sport and audience. A bibliography should preserve these variants instead of making a single supposedly fixed text out of the changing material. A reader seeking a particular game ought to inspect the version in hand.

“The Good Angel” is a subtle point of contact with future Blandings country. Its longer American magazine counterpart, “The Matrimonial Sweepstakes,” has Keggs mention that he formerly worked for Lord Emsworth. Terry Mordue identifies this as the first mention of the peer in print. The passage is absent from the shorter book story. I would never promise that someone opening the Methuen collection will encounter Emsworth by name. A connection in the history of versions differs from a character standing in the printed story before us. That distinction is why early Wodehouse repays close, unhurried reading.

There was no original American standalone edition matching the British 1914 collection. Thirteen stories had also appeared in American magazines, while other pieces reached American books much later, including posthumous gatherings called The Uncollected Wodehouse and The Swoop! and Other Stories. “In Alcala” had no American publication in Mordue’s account. A modern cover or ebook can circulate stories in another arrangement; it is not a 1914 American companion to Methuen’s nineteen. Consulting the actual contents is vital when buying an edition for one particular tale. “The Uncollected” is especially misleading as a shorthand, since it reprints material already collected here.

“Sir Agravaine” points toward comic medieval adventure; “Out of School” and “Three from Dunsterville” take different routes from youthful acquaintance. This is a splendid tasting shelf for a reader who wants to hear Wodehouse before the most familiar voices settled into place. Begin with the title story, then choose by curiosity rather than a fictitious plot order. If sporting twists appeal, follow the textual trail of “Archibald’s Benefit”; for early Blandings clues, compare the two forms of “The Good Angel.” I keep the volume as an original 1914 collection, not a retrospective miscellany assembled after Jeeves had conquered the shelves.