"The Aunt and the Sluggard" is a short story by P. G. Wodehouse, and features the young gentleman Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. The story was published in the Saturday Evening Post in the United States in April 1916, and in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in August 1916. The story was also included in the 1925 collection Carry On, Jeeves.[1]
In the story, Bertie's friend Rocky, a reclusive poet who dislikes city life, needs help from Bertie and Jeeves when he is instructed by his aunt to go to exciting parties in New York and write letters to her about them.
Plot
He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of his time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for hours at a stretch.
— Bertie describes Rocky, the sluggard[2]
In New York, Bertie is surprised to be woken by his friend Rockmetteller "Rocky" Todd, who normally lives quietly in the country. Rocky received a letter from his aunt in Illinois and namesake, Miss Isabel Rockmetteller: she will pay Rocky an allowance, on the condition that he live in New York and write to her once a week about his experiences there so she can enjoy the city second-hand. She feels that she is not healthy enough to go to New York herself, though Rocky asserts that she is only being lazy.
Wodehouse often has Bertie Wooster allude to a literary work he would have studied at school, though Bertie rarely quotes precisely, giving merely a sketchy version of the original work. An example of this in "The Aunt and the Sluggard" occurs when Bertie is at the hotel missing Jeeves: "It was like what somebody or other wrote about the touch of a vanished hand" (from Tennyson's "The May Queen"). Another example occurs when Aunt Isabel arrives unexpectedly at Bertie's apartment: "The situation floored me. I'm not denying it. Hamlet must have felt much as I did when his father's ghost bobbed up in the fairway"
The contrast in Jeeves's and Bertie's diction leads to what Wodehouse scholar Kristin Thompson terms the "translation device". Jeeves often says something that Bertie repeats in less formal language, either to make sure he understands or to translate for someone else. This device is used for comic effect in "The Aunt and the Sluggard", when Jeeves provides a long, formal, sophisticated description of his plan for Rocky to have someone else write letters about New York to his aunt. When Rocky is confused by Jeeves's complex speech, Bertie translates Jeeves's idea for Rocky in much fewer, simpler words. The humour in these situations arises from the fact that Bertie's version is much shorter than Jeeves's.
The title is a pun on Book of Proverbs 6:6 "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise."
The fictional character Jimmy Mundy is based on evangelical preacher Billy Sunday.
In the story, Jeeves visits two nightclubs, "Frolics on the Roof" and the "Midnight Revels". Both of these names were derived from the popular "Midnight Frolics" at the New Amsterdam's Roof Garden theatre.
Publication history
1916 Saturday Evening Post illustration by Tony Sarg
Tony Sarg provided illustrations for the story in the Saturday Evening Post. Alfred Leete illustrated the story in the Strand.
The story was featured in the 1919 collection My Man Jeeves and in the 1925 collection Carry On, Jeeves. There are some minor differences between the two book versions of the story. For example, in the My Man Jeeves version, one of the phrases in the poem by Rocky Todd which Bertie quotes is "With every muscle". This phrase is changed to "With every fibre" in the Carry On, Jeeves version of the story.
The 1958 collection Selected Stories by P. G. Wodehouse, published by The Modern Library, and the 1985 collection P. G. Wodehouse Short Stories, published by The Folio Society and illustrated by George Adamson, included the story.
"The Aunt and the Sluggard" was collected in the 1958 anthology The Saturday Evening Post Carnival of Humor, published by Prentice-Hall.