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Dilemmas & costs · Leave It to Jeeves (in My Man Jeeves)

What if the insult describes a different audience?

A failed commission can suggest a new use for the work, provided the character has the skills and contacts to pursue it.

Use in my story
Read the scene & sources · Ending spoilers

Leave It to Jeeves (in My Man Jeeves) · P. G. Wodehouse

The complete Leave It to Jeeves story, including the failed engagement scheme, portrait rejection and Baby Blobbs publication; no claims about later Jeeves stories.

The situation

Corky wants to be a portrait painter but depends on his uncle Worple's allowance. He already makes occasional humorous drawings. An earlier scheme to secure approval of his engagement has disastrously resulted in his fiancée marrying the uncle. Corky is then commissioned to paint their baby, whose arrival he resents as displacing his inheritance hopes.

What the source describes

The completed baby portrait looks grotesque to Bertie, Corky and Worple. The uncle calls it an extract from a comic colored supplement and threatens to stop supporting Corky unless he enters the jute business. Jeeves takes the comparison literally as a possible market: the image could start a humorous drawing series. Corky already knows the comic editor of the Sunday Star, who needs a new series. A later scene confirms that The Adventures of Baby Blobbs has appeared and made a hit. Corky's earlier boast of an income for life remains his prediction, not a proven lifetime outcome.

How the choices connect

  1. Dependence on an unsympathetic patron forces the artist to accept an emotionally difficult commission.
  2. The portrait fails as a flattering likeness and provokes a precise comparison to comic illustration.
  3. The helper reinterprets that comparison as a use for the work, consistent with the artist's established aptitude.
  4. The artist approaches an editor he already knows; the later published series confirms a narrower, concrete success.

Watch for…

Do not turn this into a promise that every failure is secretly profitable. The story supplies comic-drawing experience, an editorial contact and subsequent publication. Jeeves's separate anecdote about a failed depilatory becoming a hair product is his story, not verified business or medical advice. Nor does the text establish that Corky deliberately made a bad portrait to execute this plan.

Read the source passages

Leave It to Jeeves: Corky's introductory comic-paper work; the baby commission; Worple's 'comic coloured supplement' insult; Jeeves's proposal; the final Sunday Star scene. ↗
Complete primary short story read in My Man Jeeves (1919), Project Gutenberg 8164, updated August 3, 2026. The success asserted here is the narrator's report of the published series making a hit.

CUESHELF INTERPRETATION

How this moves the story

A precise criticism tells the artist what the work resembles to someone else. That resemblance can suggest another audience with different expectations. A credible turn needs a bridge to that audience: relevant experience, a contact, and work that can actually be adapted. Rejection alone does not create a career.

Try it in your story

Write the commission's original purpose and one specific complaint. Find a different task for which that same quality would be useful. Establish how the creator could reach its audience, then write the first concrete adaptation or submission. Do not make success automatic.

Use in my story

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