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P. G. Wodehouse wrote so much, so well, and for so long that trying to compile a complete listing of his short fiction is a daunting task. Thanks to the correspondents* who have sent me updates to this listing, and to the many Wodehouse enthusiasts who help make the rarer items available! Some shorter items never before indexed in listings like this are now included, thanks to the efforts of those behind Madame Eulalie’s Rare Plums. New discoveries and recategorization of rare items continue as these early writings are examined, as well as additional notes on items already listed, so this will be an ongoing project.

My general criterion for inclusion in this list is whether a piece contains dialogue between named fictional characters; some short selections might better be termed vignettes or essays expressed in dialogue, but in general I lean toward inclusiveness here, and even include a few narratives about named fictional characters without dialogue and a few sketches with dialogue between unnamed characters. A category added in December 2015 to this canon includes fourteen stories with named characters told in narrative verse.

As of April 22, 2020, the table below lists 655 magazine/newspaper appearances, 14 first or rewritten appearances in books, and well over 400 collected appearances in books of 409 basic stories appearing under 515 distinct titles; of course the exact count depends on how one treats the variant versions of a story, so precise numbers are arguable. But I believe that this is the most comprehensive list available, even as a work in progress, and (with the assistance of several contributors) corrects several long-standing errors from other bibliographic sources.

My purpose is to record the initial appearances of each story on each side of the Atlantic, and to identify significant variations in the text of the stories. Many stories were later widely reprinted in newspapers and magazines as well as collected in anthologies; trying to capture all those reappearances would make this table even more unwieldy than it is, and would be generally less than helpful in the basic goal of examining just what Wodehouse wrote. The later reprints shown here are usually those with significant differences in content from the earlier versions, or with other bibliographic interest. For additional information on reprints beyond those in McIlvaine’s Wodehouse bibliography and the Addendum to it published by the International Wodehouse Association, see Arthur Robinson’s addenda.

As more information is added, the table displays better in a wide browser window, but that makes it harder for the eye to track across the columns. I hope the background tints will make it easier to see the grouping of the variant versions of the stories.

If you enjoy this page, you may also want to visit my somewhat less daunting page of data on the Wodehouse novels.

Column 1: The stories are generally listed by the familiar titles under which they appear in book collections, but alternate titles are cross-indexed. A parenthetical title with the abbreviation cf. refers to an earlier or later story with significant plot similarities or reused elements. Without the abbreviation, parentheses indicate a series title (as with “Tales of Wrykyn”) or a subtitle.

Column 2: The number-and-letter code comes from Daniel H. Garrison’s Who’s Who in Wodehouse; for stories not included in previous editions I’ve followed his pattern to assign new codes. The new third edition (published February 2020) includes characters from this expanded list of fiction. Some stories which were significantly revised for their book appearances are getting two codes where one served before, as shown in the table below. References to “Garrison 2nd” are to the previous 1989 edition.

Column 3 indicates the principal series characters involved, or the genre or topic of the story if not based on recurring characters.

Columns 4-7: The initial magazine/newspaper appearances of the story and significant reprints are shown, with dates in year/month/day or year/month format. If the magazine name is formatted as a hyperlink, the story is available at the web site of Madame Eulalie’s Rare Plums; follow the link for further details. Stories published after the end of 1928 are still under copyright in the USA and thus are not available at Madame Eulalie’s site. Column 7 shows the title as it appeared in the periodical when that differs from the collected title in column 1.

Column 8 lists the most commonly available book collections in which the stories appear; an index to the codes is at the bottom of the table. The suffixes identifying the versions of the collections have been updated as of 28 June 2018 for conformity with the third edition of Who’s Who in Wodehouse; collections formerly referred to as “English” (previous codes such as YMSe) are now “British” (new format: YMSB). Recently published story collections are not in general included, unless they include stories not previously collected in book form which are not available online; it would be impossible as well as unnecessary to keep up with US public-domain reprintings of early stories based on texts from Project Gutenberg, Madame Eulalie, and similar sources. Where I have been able to determine which of multiple magazine versions is the source for a book appearance, the book is listed in the same row of the table. If the book reference spans multiple magazine reference rows, I would be grateful for additional data about the relation between book and magazine versions. Parentheses around the code of a book indicate that significant reworking happened between magazine and book editions.

Column 9 contains explanatory notes. By “essentially identical” I mean that the differences between versions are in American vs. British spelling and punctuation, paragraph and section formatting, or other purely copy-editorial choices. “Substantially identical” or “very similar” means that there are minor changes in wording, names, settings, currency amounts, etc., or a sentence added or omitted here and there, but the story versions proceed along the same lines throughout. Word counts are as made by Microsoft Word, and are for approximate comparison only, since hyphenation of compound words and similar formatting issues may affect the calculation.

Stories collected in The Inimitable Jeeves were sometimes split into two chapters in that book (abbreviated IJ below); I’ve indexed both chapter titles here for completeness, but I treat the original magazine story as a single unit.

Please send corrections and additional information to me at the Contact link.

—Neil Midkiff
   1 January 2024

*I’m grateful for information and suggestions from Tony Ring, Fr. Rob Bovendeaard, Arthur Robinson, Ian Michaud, John Dawson, Charles Stone-Tolcher, Michael Thompson, Nick Townend, Anthony Smith, Brad Stevens, Bill Huey, Ananth Kaitharam, Krishnamurthy Ganapathy, Karen Shotting, Jessy Dowling, Gus Caywood, Ken Clevenger, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten to credit.

 
© 2024 Neil Midkiff