Love Among the Chickens

Love Among the Chickens is P. G. Wodehouse's early comic novel of romance, bad planning, poultry farming, and magnificent financial irresponsibility. Jeremy Garnet is drawn into the latest scheme of his old friend Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, a man of boundless confidence and almost no practical sense, who has decided that running a chicken farm in Dorset is the sure road to prosperity. What follows is a classic Wodehouse comedy of misplaced optimism, rural chaos, unpaid bills, romantic complications, social embarrassment, and chickens behaving exactly as chickens are likely to behave when placed at the centre of a business plan.

First published in 1906 and later revised by Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens is notable as the first appearance of Ukridge, one of Wodehouse's great comic forces of disruption. The novel shows the young Wodehouse already developing the machinery that would define his mature comic fiction: impossible schemes, buoyant dialogue, emotional entanglements, amiable disaster, and an instinctive sympathy for people who should know better but rarely do. For readers of classic comic fiction, British humor, romantic farce, early Wodehouse, and light English novels, Love Among the Chickens remains a brisk and charming entry in the Wodehouse canon.