PG Wodehouse to Be Honored with a Memorial at Westminster Abbey

Fans of PG Wodehouse will be pleased to learn that, 43 years after his death, the author is set to be memorialised by Westminster Abbey. The news was especially exciting to the the Wodehouse Society and by Ben Schott, the author of a new Jeeves and Wooster story, who described the Jeeves and Wooster creator as the “personification of a very specific breed of English writing.”

Schott stated that when the news was announced that the Dean of Westminster had given permission for a memorial to Wodehouse in the abbey, “there was a ripple of joy that it was happening, but also puzzlement that it hadn’t happened before.”

“Not that his cap needs any more feathers, but if it did, then here is the highest honour in the land,” said Schott. “He would have been absolutely delighted to be there. He is the personification of a very specific breed of English writing.”

PG Wodehouse wrote over 100 books, created classic characters such as Jeeves and Wooster to Psmith, received a knighthood at 93, and passed away in 1975. He will be memorialised with a stone at Westminster Abbey, though an exact location is still to be selected. Wodehouse will join other great writers and poets in Westminster ‘Poet’s Corner, from Jane Austen to CS Lewis.

As The Guardian reports, Wodehouse Society chairman Hilary Bruce called the decision “a recognition of Plum’s place in the literary pantheon” and said “his stone will deservedly lie among those of some of the greatest writers in this country’s history and his own literary heroes.”

“People think of his writing as light comedy, but light comedy takes heavy work. It takes tremendous skill to wield words in a light-hearted way,” said Schott. “It’s fitting he will be there with his heroes, such as Trollope, Dickens and Shakespeare, but also alongside Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Both of the latter are like Wodehouse, in that you only have to read a line of them and you know exactly who it is. Literature has always spanned the high and the low, and it’s a mistake to think there is a huge chasm between them.”