Ukridge

A new scheme before the last one has cooled

Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge can make an impossible undertaking sound like a practical arrangement whose only missing ingredient is somebody else’s loan. He is buoyant, ingenious and almost incapable of hearing an objection until the next plan has begun. His friend and narrator Jeremy Garnet often sees the danger before Ukridge does, yet is repeatedly drawn into the adventure. The result is an unusually energetic corner of Wodehouse: schemes travel through boarding houses, farms and sporting enterprises, while a friendship provides the steady point from which to watch them fail. The early novel and the later story collection are different ways of meeting this magnificent optimist.

Love Among the Chickens, the 1906 debut, sends Ukridge and his wife Millie to a chicken farm and gives Jeremy his own romantic interests. That married man is a revealing contrast to the bachelor Ukridge of the later stories. A modern copy may follow the 1921 text, which Wodehouse substantially rewrote; the 1906 original, its 1909 American version and the revision are not identical texts. If you are buying the book for a study of early Wodehouse, check which one you will receive. If you are arriving for entertainment, the farm’s economic logic and Jeremy’s predicament make a splendid opening without any preparatory reading.

Ukridge gathers ten stories in a 1924 British collection. The American book, He Rather Enjoyed It, followed in 1925 under another title. A new reader who wants a quick taste can start with Ukridge’s Dog College, then sample the whole collection. The short form suits a man whose plans may be fully formed by breakfast and disassembled by tea. A scheme involving dogs, insurance or boxing can turn on a tiny practical detail that its inventor has not thought worth considering. Jeremy’s account supplies a mildly exasperated affection that prevents these from reading as mechanical demonstrations of cleverness.

Publication order is a poor fictional timeline here. The novel introduces a married Ukridge, while the later tales recount earlier bachelor days. They are not a sequel showing what happens after the chicken farm in ordinary calendar order. The collection is a return to a character whose comic potential Wodehouse had recognised, with another narrative frame and shorter plots. That difference is worth remembering when someone promises a simple two-book chronological saga. The shelf orders book records by first British publication; it leaves fictional time flexible and points readers to the edition notes rather than claiming the revision created a new original novel.

Nor are these two spines every Ukridge appearance. Stories turn up in Lord Emsworth and Others, Eggs, Beans and Crumpets, Nothing Serious and Plum Pie, with regional contents that do not always match. Those mixed collections are indexed on their own shelf, and their pages identify known story appearances. There is a particular collector’s pleasure in tracking a character across an unexpected anthology, but buying all those books without checking the tables of contents can repeat stories or miss one. The link trail is a guide to distinct texts and placements, not a promise that every modern edition preserves the first collection’s exact order.

George Tupper and other figures can receive the full force of Ukridge’s enthusiasm; Jeremy has to live with its consequences. The friendship matters because Ukridge’s audacity is most amusing against someone who knows the price of a meal, a room or a failed business. His language presses forward faster than the evidence. He is not simply a businessman who happens to make mistakes: he imagines the social world as a pool of potential collaborators, even if those collaborators would have preferred to keep their money and their afternoon. The tension between generous intention and borrowed resources gives the stories their rhythm.

My suggested route is the first two book records in publication order if you enjoy an early novel, followed by the scattered later stories through the mixed collections. For a reader who wants the mature short-story voice immediately, reverse those first two: open Ukridge, then go back to the chicken farm and compare the character’s first presentation with the later raconteur’s version. In either order, pause at the 1921 revision warning. An adaptation or an audiobook listing should name the specific work and its contents; the mere appearance of Ukridge in a package title cannot establish whether the complete original collection is there.

Wodehouse Playhouse included stories from the author’s short-story worlds, and the Wodehouse Society documents its 1975–78 run. I have not asserted that an episode adapts a specific Ukridge tale without an episode-level match. The written stories are reward enough: a sharply timed narrator, a proposal that sounds superb for a moment, and the inevitable encounter with a small fact Ukridge would rather not examine. The pleasure of this shelf is to keep turning the page after a disaster, because the man who caused it has already found a new opportunity.

The two principal books also show how Wodehouse revised a character without erasing the earlier record. A collector can read the 1906 farm story alongside the 1921 rewriting and hear the later craftsman returning to a youthful idea. The short tales then shift the emphasis from a sustained romance to a sequence of entrepreneurial improvisations. Each version has its own place on the shelf; none should silently replace the other in a description of the original publication.

I would read an Ukridge story when I want a scheme that is enormous in imagination and alarmingly small in preparation. His enthusiasm gives every proposition a persuasive first sentence. The narrator’s growing unease supplies the second. That opposition is the pleasure of the stories: one man can see the fortune, while the other can already see who may have to pay for it.