Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised at the values Dickens and Wodehouse shared: both, after all, were Victorians. Wodehouse was born in 1881, only 11 years after Dickens died, so he had reached manhood and embarked on his career as a writer (while still working in a bank) by the time the old Queen died. However, he thought of himself and his subjects as essentially Edwardian. A fair number of the letters collected and sympathetically edited by Sophie Ratcliffe, an Oxford don, have appeared before but many are previously unpublished. Where Dickens was a public man, Wodehouse was intensely private, as his letters underline. He had a touch of the Bertie Woosters, being as dependent on his his adored wife Ethel as Bertie was on Jeeves. In his letters to her and her daughter Leonora ("Snorky"), whom he adopted and on whom he doted, he is never afraid to display his emotions in a most unexpected way. But in other respects he was tough, businesslike and insightful, particularly in financial matters. He was no fool on politics either, with one notable exception. In April 1939 he blithely wrote to Townend: "Do you know, a feeling is stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present." It was a feeling that was shared by many more influential figures, but this innocence must have contributed to the disaster that he brought on himself with his Berlin broadcasts recounting his experiences as an elderly intern of the Germans. His letters show how he fully recognised his stupidity but was still baffled that politicians could not see that he meant no harm. After the war he was gratified to learn that American intelligence had for years been using his broadcasts as examples of subtle resistance. 

He was not afraid of being unfashionable. In 1947 he wrote: "Aren't the Jews extraordinary people ... I was totting up the other day and found that, apart from my real inner circle of friends (numbering about three) most of the men I like best are Jews ... But, my gosh, what idiots the British Government are. At the very moment when it is vital to have good relations with America they go and pull that Exodus stuff and club Jews and put them behind barbed wire and so on. I should have thought it would have been infinitely better to let the poor devils into Palestine."

Wodehouse was not above burnishing his own image. When a book of the Wodehouse-Townend correspondence was proposed (it became Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters), Wodehouse wrote to his publisher: "It is hopeless to stick to what I actually wrote. What I must do is to write a lot of entirely new stuff and to hell with whether it is not word for word what I wrote to Townend on June 6, 1931!"  And beneath the genial facade he was a man of strong opinions: "I dislike Rex Harrison on stage more than any other actor ... I think Christopher Fry should be shot."  He had once thought Groucho Marx "screamingly funny"; his television show showed him to be "repulsive". 

  Sadly, such collections, showing the private side of great writers (and others), may soon be a thing of the past, for who writes letters any more? Will authors carefully preserve their emails, and entrust their disks to their agents? If they don't we may be deprived of the frank assessments writers privately make of their fellow authors, such as Wodehouse on his great predecessor: "Do you hate Dickens's stuff? I can't read it."