Full Moon by P. G. Wodehouse

First published: 1947

Type of work: Romantic farce

Time of work: The 1940’s

Locale: A country estate in aristocratic Great Britain

Principal Characters:

• Clarence Earl of Emsworth, the patriarch of Blandings Castle
• Colonel Wedge, his brother-in-law and a guest at Blandings Castle
• Veronica Wedge, the colonel’s daughter
• Freddie Threepwood, the earl s son
• Tipton Plimsoll, the American suitor of Veronica Freddie’s “rival”
• Galahad Threepwood (Uncle Gally), a trickster and matchmaker for the young lovers

The Novel

Blandings Castle, a well-used setting for P. G. Wodehouse’s comic novels, is an aristocratic country estate overseen by the venerable but hopelessly absentminded Earl of Emsworth. Once again, it is the stage on which a cast of unwittingly ironic, self-consumed characters roam from social gathering to social gathering and plot both romantic and business couplings among the British aristocracy and the American nouveau riche.

A guest of his brother-in-law, Lord Emsworth, Colonel Wedge ponders with his wife, Hermione, what will happen to his attractive daughter, Veronica: “the dumbest beauty” listed in the social register. Veronica was once engaged to her cousin, Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth’s son, but Freddie instead married the wealthy daughter of an American dog-biscuit manufacturer, becoming one of his father-in-law’s chief ambassadors for the company.

This rather placid setting is upset, however, by the arrival of Tipton Plimsoll, a rich young American whose father owns the chain of Tipton Stores, a lucrative retail outlet in the United States. Freddie has brought Tipton to the estate in the hope that he could convince him to carry his line of dog biscuits exclusively in his stores. Meanwhile, with Colonel Wedge’s complete endorsement, Tipton falls madly in love with Veronica.

After accidentally discovering that Veronica and Freddie were once betrothed, Tipton undermines the normally peaceful castle in a series of uproarious events in which he mistakenly attributes to Freddie a secret devotion to Veronica. The tranquillity of the castle is further threatened by a subplot in which Prudence, Colonel Wedge’s niece, is forced to call off her marriage to her beloved Bill Lister. Midway through the novel, Blandings Castle is in utter turmoil over the triangles created by the competing and thwarted lovers.

All is saved, however, when Galahad Threepwood, “Uncle Gally,” intervenes with a series of wildly ingenious, quite improbable, but ultimately successful schemes to reunite both sets of young lovers. In the end, each lover is paired off with an appropriate partner, and Blandings Castle returns to its rightful, complacent state.

The Characters

The plot of Full Moon, filled with Wodehouse’s trademark schemes and counterschemes, completely overshadows its cast of stock characters. The Blandings estate had been used serially in at least twelve previous novels and many more after that. Consequently, Wodehouse wrote Full Moon for a group of readers who needed no introduction to the propensities and predicaments of its protagonists and antagonists. In this, he indeed seems to have been the precursor of the “situation comedy,” creating a hunger in the public for the next round of adventures for a familiar crew of eccentrics, ne’er-dowells, and young lovers.

Wodehouse populates Full Moon with distinctively snobbish, slightly anti-intellectual characters often laden with colorful, preposterous names. “Freddie Threepwood” and “Tipton Plimsoll” exemplify his penchant for calling attention to the pretentiousness of the ladies and gentlemen of high society. Their improbable surnames accentuate the frequent silliness of the social situations into which Wodehouse places them; they invite the reader to treat their actually minor travails as major trials with mock-heroic seriousness.

The fulcrum of the story is, nevertheless, the endearing Lord Emsworth, an increasingly senile country gentleman—a widower who has nothing better to do with his time than observe the tribulations of his fellow gentry and raise prize pigs and pumpkins. He is utterly self-effacing, bossed about by his sisters and their spouses and offspring, yet always somehow in the middle of an adventure. Wodehouse never patronizes this elderly gentleman, however, and is clearly charmed by his aloof perspective above the commotion of relatives all about him.

As gentle as Wodehouse is in mocking the foibles of the aristocracy, he is merciless in his parodying of obstinate American businessmen and their cocky sons “on tour” of the British Isles. American “efficiency” and paranoia are satirically focused in Tipton Plimsoll, the stereotypical brash American, fond of tweaking the social etiquette of British society while pursuing what he wants at all cost.

In the end, with few exceptions, Wodehouse’s characters manifest no depth and reflect no serious development. The Lord Emsworth of a 1910 novel has neither aged nor matured by his appearance in a 1950 novel. They serve as counters and placeholders amid the comic situations and predicaments created by Wodehousian wit.

Critical Context

Full Moon is one of several novels in the Blandings cycle, all set at Blandings Castle and all carefully plotted in Wodehouse’s cinematic style. It thus represents a fair sampler of Wodehouse style and substance. His plots are ingenious and uproarious, his dialogue crisp, direct, and genuinely amusing, his endings predictably happy. His novels thus meet a general audience’s appetite for genteel romantic comedy occurring within absurdly pretentious social settings.

One Wodehousian literary trademark that Full Moon exhibits in an extraordinary manner is the masterful use of the elaborate simile. Whether he is describing Lord Emsworth’s affection for his prize pig (“He could hear her deep, regular breathing, and he was drinking it in as absorbedly as if it had been something from the Queen’s Hall conducted by Sir Henry Wood”) or the courtship of young lovers (“Tipton Plimsoll, feeling as if some strong hand had struck him shrewdly behind the ear with a stuffed eelskin, stared bleakly at this lovers’ reunion”), Wodehouse deftly uses this figure of speech to heighten the reader’s sense of his character’s eccentricities. As many critics have observed, few twentieth century writers have come close to Wodehouse’s skill in employing the simile to capture the buffoonery of snobbish characters.

Wodehouse wrote nearly fifty “adult” novels, earning praise from such disparate sources as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. In 1939, he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, and many of his contemporaries regarded him as a modern Oscar Wilde. Among critics of Wodehouse, there is hardly a middle ground: He is regarded either as one of the most amusing English-language humorists in the twentieth century or one of the most predictable and, thus, redundant writers ever to achieve public success.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Frances. P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography, 1982.

Hall, Robert A., Jr. The Comic Style of P. G. Wodehouse, 1974.

Usborne, Robert. Wodehouse at Work to the End, 1977.

Voorhees, Richard J. P. G. Wodehouse, 1966.

Wind, Herbert W. The World of P. G. Wodehouse, 1972.