Mrs. Murphy

Magazine serialisation

P.G. Wodehouse first published the Webster story under the title The Story of Webster in the January 1932 number of The Strand Magazine in Britain and simultaneously in the American magazine Cosmopolitan. The companion piece, Cats Will Be Cats, ran in The Strand in November 1932. Both stories belong to the Mulliner sequence Wodehouse had been writing since 1924, framed by anecdotes told at the Anglers' Rest pub by the loquacious Mr Mulliner about his various nephews.

Book publication

Herbert Jenkins collected the two Webster stories alongside seven other Mulliner tales in Mulliner Nights, published in London on 17 January 1933 in a print run of 12,000 copies. The American edition followed on 24 February 1933 from Doubleday, Doran. The book reached a sixth impression by 1936 and has stayed in print continuously under Penguin and later Everyman editions; the 2008 Everyman compendium The World of Mr Mulliner reprinted both stories in their original order.

Plot and the fall from grace

Webster, a large black cat, is bequeathed to bohemian painter Lancelot Mulliner by his uncle Theodore, the recently appointed Dean of Bongo-Bongo, who departs for missionary work in Africa. The cat's deanery-bred dignity shames Lancelot into giving up cigarettes, late hours and his cocktail set, threatening his engagement to free-spirited model Gladys Bingley. Webster's reputation collapses when he upsets a bottle of Old Whisky in Bott Street, after which he disappears for three days on a tomcat spree and returns dishevelled. Lancelot resumes his former habits and the engagement holds.

Sources, real-life models, and reception

Wodehouse kept Pekingese dogs rather than cats throughout his life, and his correspondence published by Sophie Ratcliffe in 2011 records that the character originated in anecdotes his stepdaughter Leonora Cazalet supplied about her own black cat in the late 1920s. The two Webster stories have been broadcast at least four times on BBC Radio 4: dramatised by Richard Usborne in 1980, read by Edward Petherbridge in 1992, dramatised again by Julian Dutton in 2002, and re-read by Simon Callow for the 2009 audiobook compendium issued by CSA Word.