Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best
MINI REVIEW: The Complete Blandings Castle Short Stories
This collection includes all 9 Blandings Castle short stories by P.G. Wodehouse with an Introduction by British comedy writer Frank Muir. Blandings Castle is the home of Lord Emsworth, his prize sow Empress of Blandings, and a multitude of other eccentric comical characters.
Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best
(Paperback Edition)
Where Anything Can Happen
As described on the back cover of this delightful collection of some of Wodehouse’s finest short stories:
- Blandings Castle is the home of Lord Emsworth, whose IQ may be some thirty points below that of an absent-minded jellyfish. His Lordship loves nothing better than to potter among his flowers, but even in this garden of Eden there is an influx of serpents ready to poison the peace.
- His corrosive-tongued sister Constance is forever trying to reorganize his household. McAllister, official trainer of the prize pumpkin, leaves at a critical moment; that peach among pigs, the Empress of Blandings, goes off her food; and there is an outbreak of lawlessness not unconnected with an airgun and the trouser-seat of the abominable Baxter. And then there are the tangled love affairs of the Hon. Freddie Threepwood. Blandings is a place where anything can happen…”
Remembrances of A Lost World
The world of Blandings Castle and the characters who inhabit and enliven that world no longer exist. The world has changed irrevocably since then. However, it was real from the late 1800s through the first several decades of the 20th century, and through these pleasant and carefree stories Wodehouse masterfully and mischievously takes the reader back to those innocent, halcyon days.
This is escapism at its best: a world where dark treachery lurks in the form of Lords in neighboring English country estates snatching each others’ pig-men in order to triumph in agricultural fair competitions; a world where n’er do well aristocratic sons rise to the occasion to find their lives’ purposes by selling dog biscuits (Donaldson’s Dog-Joy, “Get Your Dog Thinking The Donaldson Way!”); a world in which even a solid staid butler cannot fight the temptation to fire an airgun into the unsuspecting back end of a nasty, and fully deserving, wayward character.
A Family Affair
The family of characters who bring Blandings Castle to life are as colorful a lot as you could find anywhere: Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth, master of Blandings; his second son Freddie Threepwood, whom Emsworth is delighted to see married off to Aggie Donaldson, daughter of “Donaldson’s Dog-Joy” himself; Lady Constance, sister to Lord Emsworth, who browbeats Clarence incessantly; Beach the butler; Rupert Baxter the efficient but evil secretary to Lord Emsworth; Angus McAllister, the stubborn head-gardener from Glasgow; Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall, a competitive neighbor who stoops as low as necessary in search of agricultural glory; and Clarence’s brother Galahad Threepwood, that “notable figure of London’s Bohemia” at whom ”the world of the theatre, the racecourse and the livelier type of restaurant had been pointing with pride for years.”
Pure Perfection
When it comes to literature, I don’t often say it, but nearly any work by P.G. Wodehouse comes about as close to perfection as is humanly possible. Frightfully intricate and well-worked-out plots, character development second to none, lots of light-hearted fun alongside genuinely insightful drama.
If you’re in the mood for some laugh-out-loud comedy, this book might just be what you’re looking for!
P. G. Wodehouse
- Wikipedia: P.G. Wodehouse
- Wikipedia: Blandings Castle
- Wikipedia: Lord Emsworth
- Wikipedia: Freddie Threepwood
- Wikipedia: Lady Constance Keeble
- Wikipedia: Rupert Baxter
- Wikipedia: Galahad Threepwood
- Wikipedia: Sebastian Beach
- Wikipedia: Minor Blandings Characters
- BBC: Zeroing in on Blandings
- The P. G. Wodehouse Society (UK)
- The Wodehouse Society (North America)
- International Wodehouse Societies
- Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 60
- Paris Review: Wodehouse Interview (PDF)
Product Information
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- Copyright: © 2001
- ISBN 10: 0141185740
- ISBN 13: 9780141185743
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Contents :: the stories
- The Custody of the Pumpkin
- Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best
- Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!
- Company for Gertrude
- The Go-getter
- Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend
- The Crime Wave at Blandings
- Birth of a Salesman
- Sticky Wicket at Blandings
Quotes From The Book
- “Presently, the cow’s audience-appeal began to wane. It was a fine cow, as cows go, but, like so many cows, it lacked sustained dramatic interest.”
- from The Custody of the Pumpkin
- “When, shortly after the triumph of Lord Emsworth’s pre-eminent sow, Empress of Blandings, in the Fat Pigs Class at the eighty-seventh annual Shropshire Agricultural Show, George Cyril Wellbeloved, his lordship’s pig-man, had expressed a desire to hand in his portfolio and seek employment elsewhere, the amiable peer, though naturally grieved, felt no sense of outrage. He put the thing down to the old roving spirit of the Wellbeloveds. George Cyril, he assumed, wearying of Shropshire, wished to try a change of air in some southern or eastern county. A nuisance, undoubtedly, for the man, when sober, was beyond question a force in the piggery. He had charm and personality. Pigs liked him. Still, if he wanted to resign office, there was nothing to be done about it.”
- “But when, not a week later, word was brought to Lord Emsworth that, so far from having migrated to Sussex or Norfolk or Kent or somewhere, the fellow was actually just round the corner in the neighbouring village of Much Matchingham, serving under the banner of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall, the scales fell from his eyes. He realized that black treachery had been at work. George Cyril Wellbeloved had sold himself for gold, and Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, hitherto looked upon as a high-minded friend and fellow Justice of the Peace, stood revealed as that lowest of created things, a lurer-away of other people’s pig-men.”
- from Company for Gertrude
- “The stoniness of Lady Constance’s expression had become more marked with each succeeding moment. What had caused it in the first place was the recollection, coming to her like a flash, that when she had entered this room she had found her brother looking like a dying duck. Honest men, she felt, do not look like dying ducks. The only man whom an impartial observer could possibly mistake for one of these birds in extremis is the man with crime upon his soul.
- from The Crime Wave at Blandings
- “It was a beautiful afternoon. The sky was blue, the sun yellow, butterflies flitted, birds tooted, bees buzzed and, to cut a long story short, all Nature smiled. But on Lord Emsworth’s younger son Freddie Threepwood, as he sat in his sports model car at the front door of Blandings Castle, a fine Alsatian dog at his side, these excellent weather conditions made little impression. He was thinking of dog biscuits.”
- from Sticky Wicket at Blandings
