Wodehouse and the Great War

james_nicoll has posted here regarding Wodehouse with an ensuing discussion regarding the place of WWI in the Wodehouseverse -- opinions seem to vary between the "quintessentially postwar" to "WWI is entirely excluded".

Wodehouse was already doing his "classic" type of froth before and all the way through the war period -- Psmith in the City (1910), Psmith Journalist (1915), Uneasy Money (1916), and Piccadilly Jim (1917) definitely qualify, so the position taken by commodorified that WWI is a prerequisite is a little over-strong.  However, it's clear that the overall market for the work may have been much expanded by the war -- it's Piccadilly Jim which is his first really big seller.

Wodehouse spent a good deal of the war in the U.S., doing Broadway musicals, from at least 1915 on.  Several books from the war years have earlier U.S. publication dates than U.K. publication dates. He certainly didn't live much in England through the twenties and thirties, and not at all after the Second World War (for obvious reasons).

Although there are certainly elements of the books which reflect the twenties (or later), the implicit setting of just about everything he wrote is effectively the Edwardian era, with occasional markers indicating a later actual date (such as a developed Hollywood industry in Laughing Gas (1936) -- Wodehouse probably had a firmer sense of Hollywood in the twenties than of England in the same period).  This explains the absence of the war -- the impact on society wasn't part of the period he was reflecting, or of which he had direct experience in England.  As the series of books continues they become less and less connected to any present world at all -- the books in the sixties and seventies, showing a pretty well unchanged Blandings, for example, are extreme forms of this.