Clergy Omnibus

by P.G. Wodehouse

In the whole delightful world of Wodehouse, the English clergy offers some of the richest sources of good-natured good humour. Confronted by burglars or belted earls, they plough serenely on with the Advent sermon or the opening of the village fete - until that is, they are swept uncontrollably into fiendish plots which only a well-disposed devil or member of the Drones Club could have contrived.

No bishop is more endearingly plump and pompous than a P.G. Wodehouse bishop, no vicar more a pillar of his community (provided his sermons aren't too long), and in this collection of short stories we watch as they are plunged into one hilarious scenario after another.

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 1992

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[Pam Larson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable collection of humorous short stories involving clergymen, culled from Wodehouse's previously published story collections. I had read them all before but still got some good laughs out of them. "The Great Sermon Handicap" has some hilarious descriptions of preachers and preaching styles. Some stories also involve cats: "Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods" (from "The Story of Webster"). The stories also feature the usual collection of Wodehouse's dim-witted British aristocrats: "Nature had made some men quicker thinkers than others. Lord Emsworth's was one of those leisurely brains" (from "Company for Gertrude").

[Cocaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

As anyone who knows anything at all about writing will tell you, the art of the tale is not only in the telling it lies within the short story format.
Who better to demonstrate this than P.G. Wodehouse who displays with consummate ease how to deliver a fully developed story with a beginning, a middle and an end and invest superb characterisation along with some of the funniest dialogue ever committed to paper on the way.
I knew before I read this collection, which concentrates on the clergy, how I loved Jeeves and Wooster but now I have discovered Mulliner and what a find that was.
Parfait.