115. Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse

Love Among the Chickens (1906) is a highly significant work in the Wodehouse canon. For a start, it is Wodehouse’s first novel for adults. It is also his first fiction of any kind to feature Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge ­— he of the ‘big, broad, flexible outlook’, the yellow mackintosh and the pince-nez held in place with ginger-beer wire. And it is the only Ukridge novel; all subsequent Ukridge offerings were short stories.

This epoch-making work had its origins in Wodehouse’s friendship with William Townend (with whom he went to Dulwich College and who was a lifelong friend; the letters in Performing Flea are written to Townend). One of Townend’s other friends, a prep-school master blessed with the unlikely and rather Wodehousian name of Carrington Craxton, had embarked on a disastrous chicken-farming venture in Devonshire, and Townend told Wodehouse about it. Wodehouse realized that Craxton’s melancholy experience would make a good novel, and used many of the details he had heard from Townend, such as an outbreak of disease that nearly wiped out the flock, and various incidents involving Craxton's numerous angry creditors. He added a love interest in the relation of the narrator, Jerry Garnet, with an attractive neighbour. The whole was a musical-comedy-esque romance that more or less formed the template for Wodehouse’s novelistic career over the next seventy years.

Consulted:
McCrum, R, ed., Wodehouse, PG: Love Among the Chickens (2002)