SOURCE: “The Birth of Jeeves,” in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 73, No. 4, Autumn, 1997, pp. 641-52.

In the following essay, Watson traces the origins and development of Wodehouse's major character, Jeeves.

I

Jeeves was conceived and born in New York. At least P.G. Wodehouse was living there when he thought of him.

That may sound like an odd place to do it, but the facts are not in dispute. After two discontented years in a London bank and a little journalism, Wodehouse settled in Greenwich Village, off and on, in 1909. He had first visited America in 1904, drawn by its boxing tradition, but he soon came to believe he could write for it; and it was there in the fall of 1914 that he met and married a young English widow called Ethel, whose daughter he adopted. War was breaking out in Europe, but his poor eye-sight made him unfit...