Do you like P.G. Wodehouse? I like P.G. Wodehouse. The quest to acquire all the Wodehouse is ongoing and difficult because I'm not content with Project Gutenburg and the strange mess that is companies printing out of copyright works. It's nice to find an old Wodehouse in the wild. "The Little Nugget" is from 1913 and technically one of Wodehouse's school novels, but coming in that transition period where the boys are incidental and instead about characters dealing with schoolboys. Or doing things around the general vicinity of school. It's post- "Psmith in the City", pre- "Psmith the Journalist" and almost a decade out from the entrance of Jeeves. Musical comedy where the hero wants to get the girl as opposed to pastoral comedy where getting roped into marriage has to be squirmed and schemed out of.
I don't think School Wodehouse is an ideal place for someone new to Wodehouse in 2023, but when you've put a lot of time into Wodehouse, it's really rewarding to read the older books and see how plots and turns of phrase and character archetypes were perfectly in place even then.
Also it's about one of the idle rich lying his way into teaching at a private school to kidnap a cigar smoking disaffected teenager before disaffected teenagers were a thing. Who doesn't love a good human heist?
