On January 1, 2019, a 1978 change to US copyright law kicked in, and hundreds upon hundreds of creative works from 1923 suddenly flooded into the public domain as their copyright expired. Among those was a childhood favorite of mine (or should I say favourite?) The Inimitable Jeeves, was suddenly up for grabs.
Jeeves and his employer, Bertie Wooster, were the creative brainchild of P.G. Wodehouse, a British author and humorist (or should I say humourist?). Bertie was a privileged man/child of the British gentry in the roaring 20's. He was constantly getting himself into the kinds of scrapes that a fool and his money can get into when one has too much time on his hands and too little life-experience in his proverbial back pocket. Consequently, he constantly relied on the good graces of his butler (or as he called him, his gentleman's gentleman) to come to the rescue in the end.
The writing was crisp and, since the stories were told from Bertie's POV, the denouement was always delivered with the impressed admiration popularized by Conan-Doyle's Watson. Which is probably why I enjoyed the series so much. Wodehouse basically took the tropes of the Holmsian model and transposed them to Downton Abbey.
So for the next series of episodes, I will be reading for your listening pleasure, The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. The music accompanying my reading will be a 1923 recording of The Charleston, composed and performed by James P. Johnson also in 1923, and also now available in the public domain.
Enjoy.
Jeeves and his employer, Bertie Wooster, were the creative brainchild of P.G. Wodehouse, a British author and humorist (or should I say humourist?). Bertie was a privileged man/child of the British gentry in the roaring 20's. He was constantly getting himself into the kinds of scrapes that a fool and his money can get into when one has too much time on his hands and too little life-experience in his proverbial back pocket. Consequently, he constantly relied on the good graces of his butler (or as he called him, his gentleman's gentleman) to come to the rescue in the end.
The writing was crisp and, since the stories were told from Bertie's POV, the denouement was always delivered with the impressed admiration popularized by Conan-Doyle's Watson. Which is probably why I enjoyed the series so much. Wodehouse basically took the tropes of the Holmsian model and transposed them to Downton Abbey.
So for the next series of episodes, I will be reading for your listening pleasure, The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. The music accompanying my reading will be a 1923 recording of The Charleston, composed and performed by James P. Johnson also in 1923, and also now available in the public domain.
Enjoy.
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