The Official Batwolf Website

Humouring the Pedants

The Batwolf is not a pedant.

But it’s okay by him if we are. And I feel duty bound to point out that the poem in To Batwolf contains a misquotation.

First, the boring bit. The third line, “God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world” might be said to misquote from Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes, published in 1841 (if Wikipedia is to be believed). And, no, I didn’t know that (either). I did know that my wording was incorrect, though. To save you clicking through to the Wikipedia article, the correct form is:

God’s in His heaven -
All’s right with the world!

(For the true pedants, I must apologise for not being able to assert with any confidence that Browning capitalized “His” but not “heaven”; my capitalization is taken from the 1906 Heinemann Classics edition.)

Secondly, the slightly less boring bit. The lines appear in several of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” stories, notably in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. I say “notably”, for this is what Wodehouse wrote:

God, as I once heard Jeeves put it, was in His heaven and all right with the world. (He added, I remember, some guff about larks and snails, but that is a side issue and need not detain us.)

Wodehouse, you see, also deals with the pedants, making it clear that he knows the source (as does Jeeves), whereas Wooster does not.

Thirdly, and perhaps more interestingly, there is what was going on in my mind when, if you like, I followed in Wodehouse’s footsteps and re-wrote the lines. For reasons prosodic, I deliberately expanded the contraction “God’s” and inserted both the caesural comma and the “and”; for reasons secular, I eschewed capitalization in “his heaven”; for reasons pedantic, I avoided quotation marks; and for reasons aesthetic, I omitted attribution.

Finally, and most interestingly: for those more familiar with Wodehouse than batwolves, or vice versa, Bertie Wooster is a batwolf. Wodehouse indicates this most subtly, of course, through the character’s initials.