[identity profile] innocentsmith.livejournal.com posting in [community profile] indeedsir_backup
A bit of canon trivia and an O RLY? for the fandom, both pertaining to Very Good, Jeeves and the oft-debated question of Bertie's age.


In "The Love that Purifies," Bertie watches his cousins' crushes on movie stars with dismay.
"'At the age of fourteen I once wrote to Marie Lloyd for her autograph, but apart from that my personal life could bear the strictest investigation.'"

Marie Lloyd

I'd fangirl her. She's like a real-world Edwardian Nanny Ogg! Anyway, since she died in 1922, the latest possible date for Bertie's birth can be put at 1906. (She went on the stage at the age of 16, which means the earliest date is 1872, but I don't think anyone would ever have suggested that.)

As for the O RLY?, quoth the great concordance Wodehouse in Woostershire:
GREAT WAR: Bertie Wooster maintained that he would ignore requests from his grandchildren to tell them what he did in the ..., and tell them instead about the time he sang Sonny Boy at the Oddfellows Hall at Bermondsey East. (Cosmo-SOS)

I can't find this in the version of "Jeeves and the Song of Songs" I've got in Very Good, Jeeves, but the concordance also observes that some of the stories therein were edited for the collection after their original publication. In this case, in Cosmopolitan, September 1929.

So if we accept this as canon*, that does suggest fairly strongly that he did do something. It doesn't absolutely confirm it, of course; he could be reckoning that his putative grandchildren would have no sense of time and would shortly thereafter be asking about his role in the Napoleanic Wars, as well. Or he could be dodging the question because he got of fighting due to flat feet, or something. (Though I think the Code of the Woosters would have demanded he at least try to enlist.) Still. Interesting for speculation's sake?

*And I can just picture Plum groaning that that's why he took it out, for God's sake, he'd gotten stuck having assigned Lord Emsworth an age and didn't intend to do it again, and anyway don't I have anything else to do besides overanalyze to this extent?
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