The son of a civil servant and himself the product of a second-rank public school, Wodehouse was English to the core. He spent most of his adult life abroad, first in France and then in the United States, but he was as sensitive to class distinctions as any writer who ever lived, and never showed the slightest resentment toward them. In fact, he has, with meticulous care, excluded from his books anything that could be at all relevant to the real world. One sign of this is the dispute, such as it is, about when the books take place. But Orwell, who was born in 1903, wasn't up and about in the Edwardian period and had no firsthand adult knowledge of it, and perhaps for this reason he missed the obvious point that spats-wearing dandies like Bertie had never really existed at all.
Fantasy is the key word.
Waugh put his finger on it, in a much-quoted tribute written for Wodehouse's eightieth birthday. Wodehouse's characters, Waugh said, are not survivors of the Edwardian age. They are creations of pure fancy. . . . All, whatever the delinquencies attributed to them, exist in a world of pristine paradisal innocence. His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit.