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A Few Cultural, Biblical, and Literary Allusions
in Wodehouse's Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
I can add nothing to the many accurate and excellent reviews of Wodehouse’s wonderful Jeeves and Wooster stories. However, on this re-reading I made a few careless notes about cultural, biblical, and literary allusions in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954), which include:
Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot – several times
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Sword of Damocles
U.S. Civil War
Kipling - “Gunga Din”
Lot’s Wife
Wordsworth - “Daffodils”
T. S. Eliot
Dostoyevsky
Humphrey Bogart
Tolstoy
Longfellow – “Excelsior”
Flaubert
French Foreign Legion
Groucho Marx
Mae West
Gadarene Swine
P. T. Barnum
Helen of Troy
Balaam’s Ass
Jokes about modern poetry
Robert W. Service
Paul Revere
William Ernest Henley - “Invictus”
Robert Browning
W. H. Auden
Sherlock Holmes
Keats
Sir Philip Sidney
Roget’s Thesaurus
Shakespeare – Hamlet, Othello, Henry V, Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Julius Caesar
And I have surely missed many, many others.
Wodehouse is always therapeutic, but he is also a catalogue of the culture common to English-speaking readers of all nations and social levels in the last century, long before the chants of “Learn to code” (sometimes rendered as “Learn. To. Code.”) blasted civilization away in favor of obedient, unquestioning mechanical servitude.
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