By the Great Horn Spoon!

Much of the humor and poignancy of the novel derives from the many adjustments the English butler Praiseworthy makes, as he leaves his orderly, cloistered life in Boston for a rough, vagabond existence in the lawless goldfields of the American West. Raised and trained to be a butler, like his father and grandfather before him, Praiseworthy has never stepped out of this role, and as a result, his experiences and skill-set are almost comically limited: As he tells Captain Swain, “I open doors. I close doors. I announce that dinner is served. I supervise the staff and captain the household” (13). This narrowness of vocation also applies to his personal life: Though he feels strong emotional attachment to the people he serves, particularly Arabella and Jack, he is always careful to maintain a formal distance, lest he violate the proper norms of his profession—especially in upper-class Boston, which is not far removed from the English class system in which he was born and raised.

Forced to stow away in a dirty potato barrel, Praiseworthy makes the best of it, brushing off his crisp bowler hat and placing it on his head, before employing his practiced charm and deference on Captain Swain to better his and Jack’s situation. To work off their fare, he and Jack are assigned to shovel coal into the ship’s furnace, hard physical labor well outside their experience, but good preparation for what lies ahead in the goldfields. As the Lady Wilma enters the tropics and the temperature soars, Praiseworthy must improvise. He discovers a flair for detective work, and soon exposes the thief who stole his and Jack’s money with a soot-covered pig. He also discovers a gift for deception, when he helps Jack hide Good Luck the pig from the ship’s butcher. Later, in California, he perfects this talent—whether through exaggerating the tale of his legendary punch, or improvising a fake toothache for Jack to gain access to the condemned Cut-Eye Higgins.

As the Lady Wilma nears Cape Horn, “Praiseworthy, who was not born to adventure, was surprised to find it decidedly to his liking” (53). This is only the beginning: In California, where no one seems to know what a “butler” is, he abandons the last “badges” of his calling (his coat and umbrella), grows out his facial hair, and fully embraces his new life as a Wild West adventurer and brawler. When he calmly arranges to fight the enormous Mountain Ox in a bare-knuckle boxing match, Jack gazes at him “as if a complete stranger had been hiding through the years under the elegant manners of a butler” (148). Praiseworthy relaxes his emotional reticence as well, referring to Jack as “Jack” instead of the customary “Master Jack,” and even hugging him, almost like a son. Once he learns that Arabella, his upper-class employer, has come West to stay, he proposes to her.          

Praiseworthy is far from the first English butler to star in a fish-out-of-water story. In the 1935 film Ruggles of Red Gap, based on a bestselling novel by Harry Leon Wilson, Charles Laughton played a butler uprooted from his upper-class English milieu and taken to the American West by his new employers. Like Praiseworthy, Charles adapts to his rough surroundings, becoming a local hero and ultimately choosing to abandon his trade to settle in the West. J. M. Barrie’s 1902 play The Admirable Crichton dramatized the comic exploits of an English butler (Crichton) who, shipwrecked on a remote island with his upper-crust employers and their friends, quickly shows himself to be the most capable of them all, and eventually becomes their leader. These stories, like By the Great Horn Spoon!, incorporate social satire, suggesting that class distinctions are highly artificial and that, removed from modern society and the domination of (usually inherited) wealth, servants can often be far more competent, sensible, useful individuals than their so-called superiors.