Origins
In How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers wrote:
Lord Peter's large income... I deliberately gave him... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.
Janet Hitchman, in the preface to "Striding Folly", remarks that "Wimsey may have been the sad ghost of a wartime lover(...). Oxford, as everywhere in the country, was filled with bereaved women, but it may have been more noticeable in university towns where a whole year's intake could be wiped out in France in less than an hour." There is, however, no verifiable evidence of any such World War I lover of Sayers on whom the character of Wimsey might be based.
Another theory is that Wimsey was based, at least in part, on Eric Whelpton, who was a close friend of Sayers at Oxford. Ian Carmichael, who played the part of Wimsey in the BBC Television series adaptation and studied the character and the books thoroughly, said that the character was Sayers' conception of the 'ideal man', based in part on her earlier romantic misfortunes.
The novels are set in Britain contemporaneously with when they were written, from the early 1920s to the late 1930s. The story "Talboys" and Jill Paton Walsh's recent continuations Thrones, Dominations and A Presumption of Death continue this into the early 1940s, while Paton Walsh's third continuation The Attenbury Emeralds is set in the postwar era.
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