Thursday 25 November 2021

Valets in English Literature

Valets were a unique phenomenon in English Upper Class Society in the early part of the 20th century. They were personal attendants to the male nobility, mostly attending to their clothes.

The most famous of them, Jeeves is a valet to Bertie Wooster, immortalised by P. G. Wodehouse in his numerous novels about the duo. Jeeves is a member of the Junior Ganymede Club. (Ganymede is a satellite of Jupiter, the biggest planet. In Greek mythology, Ganymede is the loveliest of mortals & selected as the cup bearer of Zeus.) He proves his indispensability by  extricating his master from various scrapes.

Mervyn Bunter, the valet of Lord Wimsey, a creation of Dorothy Sayers, was Wimsey's Batman during the first world war & saved his life there. After the war, he joined Wimsey's service. Bunter's skills include cooking, photography & impeccable dress sense. He is forever acquiring state-of-art photographic equipment, which he uses in his master's service, whenever called for. He also attends auctions & picks up rare first editions in his master's absence, on his instructions.

The most interesting of these is neither a man nor a valet in the conventional sense, but a "pretty paragon of a parlour-maid", Doris Foljambe, who looks after Georgie Pillson, in the Mapp & Lucia novels of E.F.Benson. She looks after not only Georgie, but also his complete household, including a cook. When Georgie's sisters Hermione & Ursula visit him with their pet terrier Tiptree, he is terrified. But not so Foljambe, who has the dreaded Tiptree eating out of her hand, metaphorically speaking. Even after her marriage to Chapman, Lucia's chauffeur, she continues serving Georgie during daytime.

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