THE DIARY OF A NOBODY
GEORGE GROSSMITH, son of a law reporter and entertainer, was born in 1847. For some years he worked as a journalist, reporting police court proceedings for The Times, and in 1870 began his career as a singer and entertainer. His special connection with Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, many of the chief parts of which were his ‘creations’, began at the Opéra Comique, and from 1881 onwards he played at the Savoy. Leaving there in 1889, he toured Great Britain and the United States as an entertainer and singer until 1901. His A Society Clown: Reminiscences was published in 1888, followed in 1910 by a further volume of reminiscences, Piano and I: Further Remembrances. He died in 1912.
WEEDON GROSSMITH, brother of George, was born in 1854. He was educated at the Slade and the Royal Academy with a view to following a career as a painter, and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and at the Royal Academy. Joining a theatrical company in 1885, he toured the provinces and America, specializing in the representation of characters of the ‘Mr Pooter’ type. His novel, A Woman with a History, was published in 1896, and the best-known of his many plays, The Night of the Party, in 1901. He eventually took over the management of Terry’s Theatre London, appearing in various parts there and elsewhere until 1917, and died in 1919 in London.
ED GLINERT was born in 1958 and read Classical Hebrew, amongst other subjects, at Manchester University. He has written for Private Eye magazine since 1988, as well as many other publications, including the New Statesman, Radio Times and Independent. He is the co-author of Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler U S A and Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler Great Britain and Ireland, and author of A Literary Guide to London in Penguin.
The Diary of a Nobody
GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH
Illustrations by
WEEDON GROSSMITH
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ED GLINERT
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
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Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in book form 1892
Published in Penguin Books 1945
Reissued 1965
Published in Penguin Classics 1999
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Introduction and notes copyright © Ed Glinert, 1999
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90569–3
Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Further Reading
THE DIARY OF A NOBODY
Notes
Introduction
Evelyn Waugh called it ‘the funniest book in the world’.1 For J. B. Priestley it was ‘true humour… with its mixture of absurdity, irony and affection… a masterpiece, immortal’.2 Wyndham Lewis claimed, ‘anyone calling himself a civilised man should have a copy at home’. The Diary of a Nobody, a comic novel of late Victorian manners, has progressed from its origins as a throw-away series in Punch, which had to wait three years to be published in book form, to become an undisputed classic of English humour, with Charles Pooter taking his place alongside the Wife of Bath, Falstaff, Mr Pickwick and Bertie Wooster as a comic creation of genius.
The Diary of a Nobody first appeared not in book form but in Punch magazine as a two-and-a-half column sketch on 26 May 1888. The title was the suggestion of the editor, F. C. Burnand, a friend of the Grossmiths. It then featured in twelve of the following sixteen issues and after the 15 September entry there was a break for two months. Hence Pooter’s melodramatic outburst on the entry for 30 October: ‘I should very much like to know who has wilfully torn the last five or six weeks out of my diary.’ The Diary then ran intermittently from 17 November 1888 to 11 May 1889 when it concluded with Pooter’s proud boast: ‘Today I shall conclude my diary, for it is one of the happiest days of my life’ following the decision by his boss, Mr Perkupp, to employ Lupin. Thus the original Diary spans out the year and finishes with the fulfilment of Pooter’s greatest hope, that he can commute to and from work with his son and thus pass down to the next generation the same values and habits.
That The Diary of a Nobody originated in serial form is no surprise. Many Victorian works – Dickens’s novels and the Sherlock Holmes stories – did likewise. The Diary was considered a success as a Punch series and so it was inevitable that it would be released in book form. The publishers were J. W. Arrowsmith of Bristol,3 and the first edition (1892) contained seven new chapters and a number of new stories added (see A Note on the Text) although the tone, style and format remained unchanged. As Frank Muir in The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose said: ‘It became apparent when the pieces were put together and the diary read as one continuous story that the whole was much greater than the sum of the parts, that there was a touch of genius in the creation of Mr Pooter.’4 The book has never been out of print, its reputation growing continually. For Arrowsmith’s fifth edition in 1910 Lord Rosebery, who had been Liberal prime minister in the 1890s, was asked to provide a Foreword, and described the book as a ‘classic’. The Diary of a Nobody has been praised by generations of writers and poets since including Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman. It has inspired a tribute, Christopher Matthew’s Diary of a Somebody (set a hundred years hence, in the 1980s) and two Keith Waterhouse spin-offs based on Diary of a Nobody characters, Mrs Pooter’s Diary and The Collected Letters of a Nobody. It has also been dramatized a number of times on TV and radio, while in 1988–9 London’s Geffrye Museum ran an exhibition entitled ‘Mr Pooter’s London’.
Surprisingly the Grossmiths seemed to care little for their creation. George Grossmith in a magazine interview in 1893 gave it a passing nod and briefly mentioned it in his reminiscences, Piano and I. Neither brother made any public reference to it, and Weedon made no mention of it in his autobiography, From Studio to Stage. This was probably because at the time of publication both brothers’ reputations had already been secured through other activities. George Grossmith’s working life began alongside his father as a police court reporter for The Times at Bow Street Magistrates Court where Henry Fielding had officiated just over a hundred years previously. He began contributing to Punch in 1883 and the following year used his experiences reporting on court cases to pen a series of sketches on court life for the magazine under the title ‘Very Trying: A Record of a Few Trials of Patience’. George Grossmith was also an actor and comic singer, making his professional début on the London stage at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street in November 1870 presenting a forty-minute sketch called ‘Human Oddities’. In a most unPooterish collaboration the lyrics were written mostly by his father, George Grossmith Senior, with music by the younger Grossmith.
The two Grossmiths continued to collaborate on comic sketches around the country in the early 1870s, and
in 1877 Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan invited the younger George Grossmith to take the part of John Wellington Wells in the duo’s latest production, The Sorcerer. Grossmith was a huge success, and was given the lead comic role of the First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee’, in Gilbert & Sullivan’s follow-up, HMS Pinafore. This was followed by starring roles in The Pirates of Penzance (as Major-General Stanley), Patience (his biggest role yet, as Reginald Bunthorne, a send-up of a Wildean poet), Iolanthe (in which he played the Lord Chancellor) and Princess Ida (as King Gama, a smaller role). Grossmith was also Ko-Ko, Lord High Executioner of Titipu, in The Mikado, played the double role of Robin Oakapple/Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd in Ruddygore, and was Jack Point in The Yeoman of the Guard. In 1889, the year the Diary ended in Punch, he took a break from Gilbert & Sullivan, before resuming stage work doing one-man shows and penny readings of his own comic monologues in which he accompanied himself on piano and sang his own songs.5
Weedon Grossmith, responsible for the Diary’s unforgettable drawings, studied art at the Royal Academy and the Slade before opening up a studio in Fitzrovia. When painting commissions began to dry up in the 1880s he decided to go on stage. At a party thrown by Arthur Sullivan he met Richard D’Oyly Carte who soon after dropped him a line promising that ‘if ever art should fail… come to me and I will give you an engagement on the stage at once’. Weedon wasn’t keen at first but had little choice. In September 1885 he made his professional stage début in Liverpool in a comedy with the Clay-Vokes Company and adapted to the stage so well he later appeared with Henry Irving in the farce Robert Macaire at the Lyceum. Eventually he specialized in playing Pooterish characters. In 1898 George and Weedon appeared together on stage for the only time in the farce Young Mr Yarde and three years later Weedon’s first play, and his most successful, The Night of the Party, which he produced, and for which he also designed the scenery and poster, opened. Weedon’s illustrations in The Diary of a Nobody take the form of thirty-three black-and-white caricatures, mostly in the first half of the book. But none of these appeared in Punch. There the Diary was accompanied by line drawings – cartoons of matchstick figures and the occasional florid design stroke – supplied by J. Priestman Atkinson, a magazine regular. So how much of The Diary of a Nobody did Weedon write? Although his name appears in equal billing in the book (the Punch columns went unsigned) all the payments from the magazine went to George.
The Diary of a Nobody triumphs on a number of levels. Superficially, it can be read as the amusing diary of Charles Pooter, a gauche middle-aged clerk who lives in the north London of the late 1880s, and whose life is the epitome of ordinariness. To readers unacquainted with the culture from which it was born that level could suffice, such is the skill and economy with which it is written. But the Diary is also a careful and clever satire. It sends up not only the self-important Pooter and his ilk, and the growing genre of diaries of self-important people that were all the rage at the time, but also various trends of the day such as Aestheticism and spiritualism. It is also a superbly detailed and memorable portrait of the class system and all the inherent snobbishness of a typical member of the suburban middle classes at that time.
The Diary is that of the fictitious Charles Pooter, a clerk in a commercial office who lives in one of the then new inner London suburbs – Holloway. Over fifteen months beginning in April – it appeared in 1888 although no year is specified in the text – Mr Pooter relates the details of his tedious and unimaginative life which revolves around little more than the dull routine of work and the most banal home-and family-based social life (‘APRIL 11. Mustard-and-cress and radishes not come up yet’). Throughout the book a series of avoidable embarrassing mishaps befall him. He is refused entry to a pub on a Sunday afternoon, even though his friends have no problem getting in, because he hasn’t the sense to tell a precautionary white lie. At the theatre his bow-tie, which he hasn’t fastened securely, drops from the gallery where he is sitting into the pit below. He falls over while dancing at the Lord Mayor’s Ball because the soles of his shoes are too smooth. He is abused by a cabman who takes exception when he reveals he has no money.
Pooter’s world is a comfortable one, a ‘life among Ledgers’ as one character, Burwin-Fosselton, puts it, where anarchy and upheaval come in the shape of insolent tradesmen, incompetent servants, unpredictable friends and a devil-may-care son. Pooter’s world contains no murder, robbery, divorce or wife-beating. The only violent incident, when Pooter receives a ‘hard, intentional punch’ at the back of his head after the lights go out during a supper party, turns out to have been dealt by his friend who thought he was hitting a brick wall. The Diary mentions no newsworthy event of the day. There are no references to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1887) or to the Jack the Ripper murders (1888). There are no allusions to any contemporaneous political debate of the day, such as Irish Home Rule. Indeed there is only one political remark in the book, namely Pooter’s reflection, when he discovers the spendthrift habits of his son’s nouveaux riches friends, that ‘money was not properly divided’. Almost the entire action takes place in the inner London suburbs that were developed during the nineteenth century – Holloway, Muswell Hill, Peckham – with the odd trip to Broadstairs (a suburb on the sea) thrown in. Pooter is a man of no ambition other than to take round the plate in church and for his son, Lupin, to work in the same office. He is happy being a small cog in the wheel of the social and commercial system he supports. For while there are those above him who can never be equalled (his boss, Mr Perkupp, for instance) he knows that beneath him in the social scale are a rabble of tradesmen, errand boys and servants who keep the wheels of the Pooter household oiled.
Pooter’s character is quickly defined. He is naïve, vain, mean, prim, pompous, gullible, snobbish and conceited. He is desperate to be thought of as a wit. He is gauche to a degree that beggars belief. But he is also decent, hard-working, loyal, honest and faithful, even if insufferably so. He commits no crimes against the individual or society. Pooter may be the butt of mockery and harmless pranks from friends and colleagues but to Carrie, his long-suffering wife, and to Perkupp, his boss, he is a good man. And after countless Diary entries in which Pooter is shown up for his small-mindedness and incorrigibility the reader eventually warms to him,6 and, as William Trevor noted in the Sunday Times,7 towards the end of the book ‘we delight in’ Pooter’s personal successes. This leads to the irony that rather than remaining a nobody, Charles Pooter, at the hands of the Grossmiths becomes a somebody, a cultural and literary icon, who merits entries in the Oxford English Dictionary8 and regular mentions in the newspapers.9
To this day commentators can’t agree whether Pooter is admirable or contemptible. A Daily Telegraph editorial on 24 August 1996 following the start of a dramatized version of the Diary on the radio claimed that ‘this newspaper has always been honoured to be associated with such a decent fellow as Pooter who is not only a comic archetype but also a moral one… the kind of worthy and unglamorous figure on whom Britain’s prosperity was founded. [Pooter’s] values are timeless. He is thrifty, loyal, hard-working and distrustful of those on the make… more Pooters please.’ Two days later Francis Wheen in the Guardian rejected this line: ‘[Pooter] is also petty, snobbish and a crashing bore. We don’t want more Pooters, we have been governed by one [John Major] for six years.’10
No such confusion exists over the role of the book’s second most prominent character, Pooter’s son, Lupin. Earmarked from birth to follow his father into a secure, if lowly, position, in the same firm, and to ride with Pooter into work each day on the omnibus, Lupin continues to disappoint his father in ever more fanciful ways. Lupin has left home for the windswept cotton-spinning Lancastrian town of Oldham where he works in a bank. On 4 August he returns home without warning, announces that henceforth he will be known only by his middle name, Lupin, in place of Willy, and then when it is time to return North admits that he no longer has a job – ‘I’ve got the chuck!’ A
t large in the big city Lupin strays further and further from the approved Charles Pooter template, and joins a low comedy troupe, the Holloway Comedians. At a time when going on the stage was considered rather risqué and the music-hall beneath contempt for the staid middle class, the conservative, conventional Charles Pooter can no more understand Lupin’s involvement with this distasteful working-class form of entertainment nor the esoteric patter he banters – ‘One, two, three; go! Have you an estate in Greenland?’ – than a latter-day Pooter would empathize with his son’s involvement in psychedelia, punk rock or the latest pop trend.
But Lupin’s feet only tread the boards in his spare time. During the rest of the day his mind is clearly focused on the noble Victorian art of making money. Lupin’s characteristics neatly contrast with his father’s. Charles Pooter is loyal, thrifty, reverent and respectful; Lupin Pooter, as Keith Waterhouse explained in The Collected Letters of a Nobody,11 is ‘capricious, spendthrift, confident, cheerful and a free spirit’. When he does secure a post with Mr Perkupp’s firm he soon recommends their ‘most valued client’ to a rival. Pooter, one can be sure, would rather cut off his own hand than do likewise. Charles Pooter knows and accepts his place in society. Lupin has and wants no such niche. Charles Pooter is distrustful of those on the make. Lupin Pooter is most definitely on the make. In one day he makes £200 in Parachikka Chlorates shares, double his father’s annual pay-rise. Charles Pooter even fears that Lupin is dangerous or would be ‘if he were older and more influential’ as he reveals after a dinner party in Chapter XX. Lupin displays the values of the 1890s as described by Richard Le Gallienne, member and chronicler of the Aesthetic Movement, namely ‘perversity, artificiality, egoism and curiosity’.12 Lupin belongs more to the world of Mr Hardfur Huttle, ‘a very clever writer for the American papers’ whom we meet in Chapter XX, who like Lupin can barely wait for the twentieth century to begin, and whose New World vigour ouwits staid Britain as personified by Pooter at the dinner party in Peckham (10 May, year 2).