The Code of the Woosters

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The Code of the Woosters is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published on October 7, 1938, in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States by Doubleday Doran, New York. It features Wodehouse's best-known creation, Jeeves, and his master Bertie Wooster.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Code of the Woosters is the first instalment in the Totleigh Towers saga. It introduces the characters of Sir Watkyn Bassett, the owner of Totleigh Towers and Roderick Spode, later known as Lord Sidcup after his ascension to Earldom.

The story opens with Bertie recovering from a bachelor party he has thrown the night before for Gussie Fink-Nottle, his fish-faced newt-fancying friend. While still convelescing, he is summoned before his somewhat-beloved Aunt Dahlia, and ordered by her to go to a particular antique shop and "sneer at a cow creamer". This is an effort to sap the confidence of the shop's owner (and thus drive down the price) before the antique silver piece is purchased by Dahlia's collector husband Tom Travers. While in the shop, Bertie has his first run-in with Sir Watkyn (another collector of silver pieces) and Spode (whose aunt Sir Watkyn is planning to marry.) Bertie escapes this ordeal relatively unscathed, but later learns that, via underhanded skullduggery involving lobsters and cold cucumbers, Sir Watkyn has gotten ahold of the creamer instead of Uncle Tom, and spirited it away to Totleigh Towers. Bertie was already headed there, in a frantic attempt to patch over the sudden rupture in the engagement of Gussie and Madeline Bassett, Sir Watkyn's droopy and overly-sentimental daughter, but now he has been assigned an additional impossible task by Aunt Dahlia: recovery of the cow creamer, which is being guarded both by Spode and the local police. His situation is only complicated further by the presence at Totleigh Towers of 1. Stiffy Byng, Sir Watkyn's youngish ward, who draws Bertie into her plan to marry the local curate, another old pal of Bertie's named "Stinker" Pinker and 2. a certain leather-covered notebook of Gussie's, in which he has lovingly and extensively detailed Sir Watkyn and Spode's many character failings, and which has escaped Gussie's possession to roam freely about the local community.

Jeeves' intellect is strained to the utmost, but in the end, the two couples are still engaged to be married, the cow-creamer is headed back towards the hands of its rightful owner, and Bertie has not been beaten to a pulp by Spode, thrown in jail for stealing a certain policeman's helmet, roped into marriage with either Madeline or Stiffy, or, perhaps most terrifying of all, cut off from partaking in the cooking of the famed Anatole. In gratitude, he agrees to take the Round-The-World cruise which Jeeves has been promoting, thinking that at absolute worst, he won't be seeing Stiffy Byng...

[edit] Adaptations

Much of the plot was adapted to form the first two episodes of the second season of the ITV series Jeeves and Wooster. On 9 April 2006, BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Code of the Woosters as its Classic Serial. Andrew Sachs appeared as Jeeves and Marcus Brigstocke as Bertie Wooster.