This volume reprints two of Wodehouse’s earliest story sequences, each linked by a central character, a technique he used many times thereafter. Delightful in themselves, they are interesting chiefly as windows on a great writer’s early evolution. In the Kid Brady Stories, which bring together two early themes - boxing and the Englishman making his way in New York – we find Wodehouse learning how to present a hero who is at once touching, impressive and comic.
In A Man of Means, he looks forward to Bertie Wooster and Ukridge, but also back to his Victorian models, in a fantastic tale of the little man struggling with fate. When a humble clerk comes into a fortune, he embarks on a series of misadventures which suggest that wealth is not necessarily an unmixed blessing. Here we see signs of the satirical writer Wodehouse might have