[Professor Alfred North Whitehead] once remarked that every philosophy is coloured by a secret imaginative background which does not officially form part of its doctrines. Obviously this is even truer of fiction, but it has perhaps been less noticed that it is truest of all of very low-grade "light" fiction…. As a rule, the more lowbrow the novelist the more thoroughly he gives himself away, like the people who relate their dreams every morning at breakfast….

It is curious that, much as Mr. Wodehouse is read and admired, this aspect of his work never seems to have been studied. He is before all else a "wishful" writer, a dream writer, giving utterance to a vision of life as he would like it to be lived. By their subject-matter ye shall know them, and the subject-matter of Mr. Wodehouse's books is almost invariably the Edwardian house party, the comic...