A substantial cache of uncollected [material] such as David Jasen has got together [in The Uncollected Wodehouse] might seem surprising in view of Wodehouse's long and famous career as a writer and the many published volumes of his stories and occasional pieces. Yet here it is—juvenilia, early contributions to Punch, school stories, lyrics, romances in his inimitable vein—all the familiar Wodehousean offerings. And what is more, all up to scratch. (p. ix)

Wodehouse was not given to generalizing about his oeuvre, or to drawing attention to intimations of development in his fiction or characterizations. Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Aunt Agatha and the rest of his bright creations were as they were from the beginning, and any suggestion that they or their circumstances might change with the years—for instance, I once put it to him that Jeeves might be given a life peerage by a Labour Government—failed to register. If anything, he had a preference for his earlier over his later works, and I can readily imagine the satisfaction the present volume would have given him precisely because it consists largely of leftovers from long ago. Once I did ask him which of his books he liked best, and after some rumination he said that Mike had a special place in his esteem because it conveyed so well the scene and atmosphere of a cricket match. It was one of his very first novels to be published…. (pp. ix-x)

I confess the nomination of Mike as his favourite work rather surprised me, as I should have expected him to see it as a charming early effort preparing the way for his world-famous Jeeves books. Yet on consideration I realised that it fitted in with his character and romantic disposition. The world of the twentieth century as it developed in his lifetime was little to his taste, and he sought a sanctuary from it in the fantasy of a schoolboy world such as is portrayed in Mike and other such stories—one or two in The Uncollected Wodehouse—in which games are the chief pursuit, to excel at them is the mark of a hero, and the playing-fields of Eton (in Wodehouse's case, Dulwich) are truly the dry-run for Battles of Waterloo to come. (p. x)

[It] would be the greatest possible mistake to regard Wodehouse as merely a purveyor of escapist literature to a dying class. Beneath the cheerful comedy and the prevailing good humour there is a sharp, clear, but possibly unconscious, satirical intent. When I once put this to Wodehouse he denied the imputation as hilariously as if I had detected Freudian or Marxist intimations in his work. The fact remains, however, that Wodehouse's picture of the English upper classes in a decomposing society, despite its whimsicality, is far more convincing than, say, Galsworthy's in his Forsyte Saga. People tend to believe that only what is serious is true, whereas in practice almost the exact converse is the case. Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff is, I am sure, far more like the average Elizabethan knight than anything to be found in Spenser's Faerie Queene, as Cervante's Don Quixote is a more authentic expression of the spirit of chivalry and knight-errantry than Tennyson's Sir Galahad. (p. xi)

Personally speaking, the most touching item in David Jasen's collection was Wodehouse's first Punch contribution, "An Unfinished Collection." It recalled to me so very vividly the moment when I found myself, out of the blue as it were, sitting in the editorial chair in the old Punch office in Bouverie Street and wondering helplessly what the magazine was about. I confess I never really found out, but in so far as I did begin to get a glimmering, it involved shaping up to a certain brand of English humour, doggedly held onto by the natives, of which Wodehouse's piece was a near-perfect example. In essence, it is a sort of mystique of failure—in "An Unfinished Collection" the narrator is a failed writer who collects rejection slips—whereby a whole variety of misfortunes, like having manuscripts returned, or being overdrawn at the bank, or having to help with the washing up, are luxuriated in to the point of being funny. The nearest American practitioner is, of course, Thurber, but not even he reaches the heights of masochism of the English variety. The whole edifice of Wodehouse's humour is founded on this glorification of failure and inadequacy, though naturally, with the passing of the years, it grew more sophisticated; Mike turns into Bertie Wooster and the precocious Psmith into Jeeves….

The publication of The Uncollected Wodehouse is an occasion for a different sort of celebration by all vendors of words—to use St. Augustine's apt expression—in honour of the greatest vendor of us all. (p. xii)