Is Bertie related to Clarence?

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Is Bertie related to Clarence?

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1abbottthomas
Maio 1, 2014, 2:16 pm

I have just finished Something Fresh, the first of the books about Blandings. PGW is clearly getting his setting straight - no pig yet, un-named autocratic Scottish gardener, Lady Ann Warblington as sister-in-residence (no Connie), etc. We do have two guests (must be members of the Drones), Lord Percy Stockheath, said to be a cousin of Freddie Threepwood and Algernon Wooster, a cousin of Percy. Percy's only role is to act as an 'Awful Warning' to Freddie, having just been taken to the cleaners in a Breach of Promise case and Algernon just plays billiards. Neither appear in later books as far as I know.

So, are Bertie's Woosters related to the Threepwoods and, if so, how? If they are, why on earth was he never invited for a stay?

And, while we are on such things, does anyone know what happened to the Countess of Emsworth, or anything at all about her elder son, Lord Bosham?

2thorold
Editado: Maio 1, 2014, 3:52 pm

Bertie Wooster and the Drones Club didn't exist yet in 1915; Algernon is the first Wooster to be mentioned in Wodehouse, and he is never brought up again. The only characters who overlap between the Blandings and Jeeves stories, as far as I'm aware, are Dame Daphne Winkworth and Sir Roderick Glossop. I think Wodehouse found it useful to have several different sets of series characters that followed different narrative conventions, and didn't see any need to bring them together. If he'd brought Bertie to stay at the Castle, then he would either have had to show us Blandings through Bertie's eyes, or Bertie through the eyes of a third-person narrator. Either of which would have been tricky to handle without spoiling some of his readers' preconceptions.

The Countess presumably died sometime before the period of Something Fresh, but she's never mentioned by name.

George, Lord Bosham, appears in person in Uncle Fred in the springtime and his son (also called George) appears in "The crime-wave at Blandings".

BTW - in case anyone doesn't know, the late Terry Mordue's very useful annotations to several Wodehouse novels including Something Fresh are now on the Madame Eulalie site: http://www.madameulalie.org/tmordue/index.html

ETA: there's also a handy family tree showing all the many Threepwood relations in Sunset at Blandings. But you won't want to read that until you've read all the others...