Best 1909 Adventures (1)

By: Joshua Glenn
March 1, 2019

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1909 adventure novels. Happy 110th anniversary!

P.G. Wodehouse’s schoolboy adventure Mike (aka Mike and Psmith).

Fifteen-year-old Mike Jackson, our titular protagonist, is a talented cricket player who hopes to win a place on the school’s first team at Wrykyn — a minor public school with a strong cricketing tradition — in his first year there. He befriends Wyatt, who is something of a trouble-maker… and hijinks ensue. Cricket is central to the first section of Mike — a school-sport yarn along the lines of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) — so we are treated to thrilling cricket matches, a faked injury, and — yes — a sticky wicket. “One can date exactly,” Evelyn Waugh would later claim, “the first moment when Wodehouse was touched by the sacred flame”; Waugh was referring to the second section of Mike, in which an eighteen-year-old Mike is withdrawn from Wrykyn and sent to Sedleigh, a school with a hopeless cricket team… where he meets Psmith. The “P” in Mike’s new chum’s name is silent; he has added it in order to distinguish himself from the common run of Smiths. Psmith is anything but common: He is a fastidious monocle-sporting dandy, and a resourceful trickster who joins with Mike in various anti-authoritarian escapades. The boys eschew cricket, at first, but eventually Mike joins his house’s team and leads them to victory against a rival house… after which they face the first team from Mike’s old school, Wrykyn!

Fun facts: The two sections of Mike first appeared, separately, in The Captain, a British magazine for schoolboys to which Wodehouse often contributed. The first part, originally called “Jackson Junior,” was republished in 1953 under the title Mike at Wrykyn, while the second half, “The Lost Lambs,” was released as Enter Psmith in 1935, and later as Mike and Psmith.

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Best 1909 Adventures (1)

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