It is well-known that Jeeves’s first appearance was in a story called ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ in which he had two modest lines. Bertie is firmly, if crudely, established in it, although his name is fairly definitely Mannering-Phipps. Aunt Agatha makes her first appearance there. A little earlier in this, the second decade of the century, Wodehouse produced a scattered series of short stories for the Strand featuring an I/r-Bertic, Reggie Pepper. Some, though not all, of these were reprinted in the collection My Man Jeeves: the Pepper stories were still Pepper, although four Wooster stories set in America were added. These latter were reprinted in Carry On, Jeeves six years later and, as noted above, one Pepper story was Woosterised. Decades later more of the Pepper stories were reworked: ‘Doing Clarence a Bit of Good’ became ‘Jeeves Makes an Omelette’, one of the only two Jeeves short stories to appear after 1930, and ‘Rallying Round Old George’ was refashioned, to its disadvantage, as a very late Mulliner, ‘George and Alfred’. One point of interest in the latter reworking is that a Prince was changed to a movie mogul. What is not known is that an uncollected Reggie Pepper, ‘Disentangling Old Percy’, appeared in the Strand for August 1912 (Vol. XLIV, 219-29), bringing Florence Craye into the world. ‘Percy’ was not her father, but her brother.
