Keggs in A Damsel in Distress is supposed to be the same man who appears in The Butler Did It, but does it pan out all right? It doesn’t if you go by when the books were written. The Damsel was published in 1919 and the Butler in 1957. But I always ignore real life time. After all, Jeeves–first heard of at the age presumably of about thirty-five in 1916–would now be around eighty-five, counting the real years.
P. G. Wodehouse, letter to Robert A. Hall, August 24, 1961, quoted in Hall’s The Comic Style of P. G. Wodehouse
This would make Jeeves about eleven years older than Bertie, who is twenty-four in “Jeeves Takes Charge” and probably all the early stories too. However, in this 1960s interview brought to my attention by @rupertpsmith, Wodehouse estimates a twenty-year age difference between them. Which is it?
The play that Ring for Jeeves/The Return of Jeeves is based on gives Jeeves’s age as mid-forties, and I would assume that it’s the same case for the book. It’s set post-World War II, probably the chronological last of the series. So if Jeeves is, say, forty-five, Bertie is either around twenty-five or thirty-four. It seems unlikely that Ring for Jeeves takes place a year after the first chronological story, so I am inclined to say that the eleven-year age gap from the letter seems more plausible. However, Wodehouse is eternally vague about characters’ ages in most cases (how old even is Psmith in Leave It to Psmith? the corresponding play puts him, rather implausibly, in his early thirties, at least ten years older than Eve!), and reaching any definite conclusion is more or less impossible.
(via isfjmel-phleg)