"Pigs Have Wings," P.G. Wodehouse

 Coming off a big day in the market, this brief essay on Wodehouse’s Pigs Have Wings seemed appropriate. As all Wodehouse fans know this book stars the Empress of Blandings, a “zeppelin-shaped Black Berkshire sow,” as Wodehouse biographer Richard Usborne described her.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Pigs Have Wings, P.G. Wodehouse

November 12, 2025

 

“A shudder made the butler’s body ripple like a 

field of wheat when a summer breeze passes over it.”

                                                                                                                P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)

                                                                                                                Pigs Have Wings, 1952

 

To immerse one’s self in a book is one of life’s great pleasures. And when that book is a Wodehouse one is submerged in a bath of delight.

 

As all Wodehouse fans know, because of “Pigs” in the title, this story is set at Blandings Castle, Shropshire County. The Castle, “a noble pile” in the town of Market Blandings, is home to Lord Emsworth, his sister Constance and younger brother Galahad (Gally) Threepwood. Nearby is the town of Much Matchingham and Matchingham Hall, home to Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe.

 

The time is just days before the annual Shropshire Agricultural Show and the Fat Pigs class, a contest that the Empress of Blandings, the “apple of Lord Emsworth’s eye,” has won over the past two years, beating the Pride of Matchingham. This year, however, the Empress is in an even closer match with Sir Gregory’s new entrant, the Queen of Matchingham. Emsworth, the 9^th Earl, is a doddering, absent-minded man who is never happier than when draped over the Empress’ pigsty. As the title suggests, neither pig stays put.

 

Besides the shenanigans regarding the two pigs who are perfectly content as long as they get their 57,000 calories a day, the reader becomes enmeshed in a romantic comedy involving three couples. The genius of “the master” (a phrase associated with Wodehouse) is in how he unravels the tangled mess he creates. The joy for the reader is in how he takes a bucketful of words, unscrambles and reassembles them: 

 

What Lord Emsworth loves best – “...listening to sweetest of all music, the sound of the Empress restoring her tissues...”

 

Engaged to Orlo Vosper, but in love with Jerry Vail: “Penny gave an interested squeak.”

 

Emsworth’s former pig man, George Cyril Wellbeloved: “...his once alert brain a mere mass of inert porridge.”

 

Beach, Lord Emsworth’s butler: “But his jaw had fallen, and he was looking at his visitor in the manner of the lamb mentioned by the philosopher Schopenhauer when closeted with the butcher.”

 

Story’s end: “The moon shone down on an empty trough.”

 

Pigs Have Wings was first published fifty years after Wodehouse’s first book, The Pot Hunters, and twenty-two years before his last book, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. In between, he wrote and published at least ninety books and short stories. I have read most. This ranks with the best.