Mike and Psmith

Mike and Psmith is an early P. G. Wodehouse school novel, combining cricket, boarding-school rivalry, comic defiance, and the first full appearance of one of Wodehouse's most memorable characters. Set at Sedleigh, the novel follows Mike Jackson after he is removed from the more prestigious Wrykyn and forced into a new school where cricket politics, house loyalties, petty authority, and adolescent pride all collide. Into this world comes Rupert Psmith, urbane, unruffled, theatrical, and magnificently self-possessed, turning schoolboy conflict into a field for comic strategy.

First published in 1909, Mike and Psmith belongs to Wodehouse's early school-fiction period, before Jeeves and Wooster made him internationally famous, but it already shows the comic precision, verbal wit, and absurd social gamesmanship that would define his later work. For readers interested in classic British humour, Edwardian school stories, cricket fiction, comic novels, and the early development of Wodehouse's fictional world, this volume is both an entertaining novel and an important step in the career of one of the twentieth century's great comic writers.