As a memorial stone to PG Wodehouse is installed at Westminster Abbey, it's time to take his comic genius seriously

In my university days reading English, I remember weeks of wading through thousand-page 18th-century tomes in black despair. To cheer me up, my mother gave me a set of collected PG Wodehouse novels for Christmas. Each night I’d pick a story, dive in and immediately feel the gloom lift. In the morning I’d wake up with three or four books poking me in the ribs under the duvet, urging me to get up, like Jeeves with a hangover cure.

At the time they were a guilty pleasure, an escape from the real work of proper literature. Now I’m not so sure. For decades, Wodehouse’s closest association with the mantle of literary greatness was that he once played cricket with Arthur Conan Doyle. But today he will become the latest writer to be given a memorial at Westminster Abbey, an honour previously bestowed on Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

It’s about time, too. Wodehouse’s farcical world of aristocratic Edwardian and interwar shenanigans has been loved ever since he first created it in the Twenties. But that hasn’t stopped him being dismissed as a “performing flea” of literature, a peddler of pleasant fluff, his reputation even tarnished by a perception of him as a Hitler sympathiser thanks to his participation in German radio broadcasts while interned by the Nazis in France.