The Diary of a Nobody

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!’ At 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).

Of the book’s other characters we perhaps don’t discover enough. Pooter’s ‘dear wife’, Carrie, plays a crucial role in that until the arrival of Lupin in Chapter VI she is the major foil for Pooter. Sometimes she roars with laughter at his jokes; at other times she remains unmoved. Although she is always supportive of her husband in times of trouble the reader longs for more than a cursory view on her husband’s problems, which is probably why Keith Waterhouse went to such trouble to pen Mrs Pooter’s Diary.¹³ Pooter’s main servant, Sarah, is as unimportant to events as Mrs Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, while Gowing and Cummings, Pooter’s two regular visitors, serve as little more than conduits for contemporary fashions. Cummings is the biking freak while Gowing is big on games – billiards and more esoteric pastimes like Cutlets (see Chapter VI for an explanation of its mysteries). But essentially we find out little about them, either because Pooter himself is not interested, or more likely because the Grossmiths didn’t want too much distracting from what William Trevor called the ‘monumental presence’ of Pooter.

As satire The Diary of a Nobody fits into the Horatian rather than the Juvenalian tradition, i.e. mocking folly rather than attacking evil. In the English tradition its satirical edge is closer to that of eighteenth-century writers such as Pope and Swift than epic mid-Victorian quasi-satirical novelists like Dickens and Trollope. Its humour develops not so much from the reader’s sense of schadenfreude at Pooter’s misunderstandings but from our hero’s reaction to them. When the bath water turns red Pooter’s first thought is that he has ruptured an artery ‘and was bleeding to death’. Most people would just remember recently painting the bath red. At the Lord Mayor’s Ball one of the sheriffs slaps Farmerson, Pooter’s ironmonger, on the back and hails him as an old friend. Pooter is astonished. But as the surprise begins to wears off for the reader Pooter delivers the coup de grâce – ‘to think that a man who mends our scraper should know any member of our aristocracy!’ But for those who just want to laugh at Pooter’s blunders there are countless examples liberally sprinkled throughout the book. When he finds that the Blackfriars Bi-weekly News has left him off the list of those attending the Lord Mayor’s Ball he writes to complain. The result is that the paper misspells his name. He complains about that so the paper misspells it again, differently – twice. Buying Christmas cards in a drapers store on the Strand he sides with an attendant over careless shoppers who spoil cards only for his own coat-sleeve to get caught up in a pile of expensive Christmas cards which he knocks over and damages. The shop is then obliged to sell off the cards cheaply.

At the East Acton Volunteer Ball he is accosted by a waiter who wants £30s. 6d for the food and drink that Pooter’s party has consumed. Pooter is mortified. He had assumed that everything was free. So, through his own naïvety he is obliged to pay for two people he hardly knows. There are fewer examples of humour incidental to Pooter, but one often cited involves the ridiculous Padge ‘who appeared to be all moustache’. A loose acquaintance of Pooter’s friend Gowing, Padge appears for the first time on 23 November to witness Burwin-Fosselton’s impersonations of Henry Irving. He takes the best armchair and says nothing all evening other than ‘That’s right’ to every statement.¹⁴ Padge turns up uninvited the next night but his vocabulary has not increased. We then forget Padge but he reappears six months later at the East Acton Volunteer Ball where he slaps Pooter on the shoulder and shakes his hand. The joke is reworked expertly for when Pooter inquires, ‘Mr Padge I believe?’ he replies, ‘That’s right’. Other aspects of the book’s humour are more arcane, particularly the snatches of theatrical and music-hall banter regularly cracked by Lupin Pooter and his pals from the Holloway Comedians.

The Diary of a Nobody sends up a number of popular late nineteenth-century trends that needed debunking: particularly the notion of the Very Important Diary. By the 1880s anyone who was anyone, from the deservedly famous to the semi-prominent and the downright forgettable, was producing their memoirs, and by the time The Diary of a Nobody first appeared Punch was running spoof diaries of a dyspeptic, a pessimist, a duffer and an MP, and so accompanying the first instalment of the Diary in Punch the editor included the rider: ‘Everybody who is anybody is publishing reminiscences, diaries, notes, autobiographies and recollections…’ ¹⁵

Those lampooned in The Diary of a Nobody for their painstaking recording of the banal and trivial include Dearman Birchall, a cloth merchant, William Macready, actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1840s, and Henry Crabb Robinson, a barrister and war correspondent for The Times. For instance, Dearman Birchall records under 19 January 1882: ‘Fancy dress ball to open the entertaining room at Barnwood. I was dressed as Mahomet Bel Hadgi, the father, and Emily as the mother of Lindaraja. We were not recognised at first,’¹⁶ a calamity with which Pooter would have wholeheartedly sympathized. Macready’s entry for 29 July 1837 reads: ‘Walked to Oxford St, took cab home. The cabman insisted on 2/– [fare] which I resisted; and on his persistence I made him drive me to the police office, where a deposit was made for the measurement of the ground. I walked home.’¹⁷ Compare this with Charles Pooter’s plight at the hands of the hostile cabman after the East Acton Volunteer Ball. Then there was Henry Crabb Robinson who records how on 27 August 1864 ‘The day was devoted to looking over old letters – a necessary task and the sense of its being a duty almost its only inducement.’¹⁸ Again one doesn’t have to imagine too hard to visualize Pooter spending a day doing likewise.

A more sophisticated antecedent is the Revd James Woodforde’s Diary of a Country Parson 1758–1802. Woodforde kept an almost daily record of his largely uneventful life during this 44-year period, commenting on such cataclysmic events as the storming of the Bastille alongside coverage of what he’d had for breakfast that day. But even Woodforde wasn’t averse to dropping in the kind of observation that can only be described as Pooterish. On 2 May 1788 (just over a hundred years to the day before Pooter’s arrival) he reveals: ‘My little cart was brought home from being painted and now looks very smart indeed. It is of a very dark green.’ Charles Pooter with his enthusiasm about painting the bath red (27 April, year 1) would have been proud of such an entry. Nor is The Diary of a Nobody the last in the line. Out of a host of descendants the two most important late twentieth-century examples are Sue Townshend’s Adrian Mole and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, both of whom have appeared heading hugely popular best-selling spoof diaries firmly in the Pooter tradition of naïve hero at a loss to explain the mundane nature of their own tightly defined world.

Other Victorian preoccupations of the time which are expertly caricatured in The Diary of a Nobody include bicycling (Cummings’s entire life-story appears to be replayed through Bicycle News, which nobody else reads), spiritualism, introduced to the Pooter household by the dread hand of ‘Mrs James of Sutton’, and the Aesthetic Movement, the leading counter-culture tendency of the time. A revolt against the trend towards standardization and mass production, the Aesthetic Movement railed against the strict moral standards of the time, rejoicing in the tag ‘art for art’s sake’. The Aesthetic Movement developed in the late 1870s around the ideas of the critic and essayist Walter Pater, and soon attracted that most flamboyant and dandyish of late nineteenth-century figures, Oscar Wilde. Long before The Diary of a Nobody Wilde was being sent up in Punch in cartoons and skits. In 1881 Punch editor Frank Burnand wrote a comedy called The Colonel which included a character, Lambert Stryke (played by Beerbohm Tree) who was a send-up of Oscar Wilde. That year George Grossmith began playing the poet Reginald Bunthorne complete with knee-breeches à la Wilde and a wig with one single white lock à la Whistler in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience. Another Wilde influence on The Diary of a Nobody emerged from the poet’s taste in interior design. In 1884 Wilde moved into a house on Tite Street, Chelsea, and with the aid of James Whistler and the architect Edward Godwin painted almost everything white – the front door, hall, stairs – and, as Wilde explained, ‘different shades of white in the dining room’. It was not the sort of thing people did in those days, and so in The Diary of a Nobody Charles Pooter sees himself as being particularly risqué when he paints much of the house – flower pots, the servant’s bedroom furniture, the coal-scuttle, ‘the backs of our Shakespeare’ and, most absurdly, the bath, in red.

There are other Aesthetic Movement influences evident in The Diary of a Nobody. As Raymond Chapman explained in The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832–1901,¹⁹ ‘touches of frivolity became permissible even in the suburban villa’, and so even though Pooter is unlikely to be conversant with the latest movements in art, and Carrie likewise, the ubiquitous ‘Mrs James of Sutton’ almost certainly is. It is she who is responsible for Carrie’s flirtations with Aesthetic touches such as writing on dark slate-coloured paper with white ink and draping the mantelpiece with toy spiders, frogs and beetles, an obviously impractical art-for-art’s-sake deed which baffles Pooter who ‘preferred the mantelpiece as it was’.

Throughout its trenchant satire and rich comedy The Diary of a Nobody also manages to paint a memorable portrait of the Victorian class system. Pooter is a terrific snob, even though he has little to be snobbish about. As far as we know he has attended no great school, has little cultural awareness (he never visits an art gallery, reads anything other than the Daily Telegraph, or takes any interest in learning) and is only a lowly clerk when we first meet him. Yet he continually shows contempt for those supposedly lower down the social scale and, determined to keep his distance from such people, is mortified when Farmerson, the ironmonger, turns up at the Mansion House Ball (7 May, year 1). ‘I simply looked at him, and said coolly: “I never expected to see you here.” ’ Farmerson then has the gall to know one of the sheriffs. ‘To think that a man who mends our scraper should know any member of our aristocracy!’ In one stroke Pooter displays admirable ignorance: sheriffs are appointed and no more aristocratic than clerks. And in any case, how could a ‘member of the aristocracy’ have gone to school with Farmerson?

Most of all Pooter’s position is defined by his address. If he were Perkupp he might live in sumptuous surroundings such as Kensington or Chelsea. Instead, as one of Perkupp’s underlings, he is obliged to inhabit that most hellish of English locations, suburbia. Pooter’s suburban hell is Holloway with which the Grossmiths were well acquainted, having been raised in Hampstead, two miles west, and having attended the North London Collegiate School in neighbouring Camden Town. Holloway was just one of scores of erstwhile London villages which grew rapidly following industrialization from being an insignificant Middlesex hamlet, separated from London proper by a few miles of farms and fields, to being part of the new London sprawl covered with rows of houses, roads, schools, shops and warehouses. The capital’s population rose accordingly. As David Thorns showed in Suburbia,²⁰ ‘During the second half of the 19th century the population of London’s outer ring grew by approximately fifty per cent in each of the ten-year periods between the census of 1861 and that of 1891.’

A crucial factor in Holloway’s growth was the arrival of the railways, by which Pooter lives, as set out very early in the book. David Thorns in Suburbia claimed that ‘the growth of the suburbs… was almost entirely the product of the improved system of public transport’,²¹ not that improved transport was necessarily beneficial to the area, for as the London Encyclopaedia puts it, ‘the expansion of the railways, the spread of industry and grim housing with no space for parks made Holloway a synonym for a drab existence’.²²

Holloway, mostly residential with only a smattering of light industry such as timber yards and goods depots, was aimed specifically at the white-collar brigade of clerks whose number mushroomed as the financial sector needed to keep the heart of the empire beating grew. By the beginning of the 1890s there were 100,000 clerks in the City.²³ Holloway, though salaried and middle class, had little conspicuous wealth and few facilities. The houses were tightly packed with just enough room for a garden, but care was taken on the design of some of the properties, especially those to the north, near the hills of Highgate, and especially where clerks like Pooter could feel reassured by one or two architectural flourishes. So while Pooter’s home, ‘The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace’, as drawn by Weedon Grossmith, may be a basic square box, the dash of baroque features add the kind of integrity that would gladden Pooter’s heart. There are heavy stone facings on the windows, a cornice with parapet and a half-basement. There is a stuccoed base and a flight of steps up to the porticoed front door (which is never used anyway). The main living area is slightly raised above the street level in the Italian piano nobile style so that Pooter can feel elevated from the common herd.

But where did the Grossmiths set the Laurels? There are countless examples of such houses throughout north London but there is no evidence that the Grossmiths based Pooter’s house on a real address, and there now remains only one such house in Holloway that backs on to the railway – 1 Pemberton Gardens – close to Upper Holloway Station. When Richard West, researching for the Independent an article commemorating the centenary of the book version of The Diary of a Nobody, found this house in 1992, like so many houses of its size and style in north London it had been divided into flats.

Houses designed like the Laurels, ridiculed at the time, are now considered desirable by most home-owners. The locale less so. The suburbs have always been ridiculed as a place of inferior status to the city or countryside. Ben Jonson in Every Man in His Humour (1598) cracked the line: ‘If I can but hold him up to his height… it will do well for a suburbe-humour.’ By Victorian times the rapid growth of new suburbs like Holloway led to fresh attacks. An anonymous contributor to The Architect in 1876 wrote: ‘A modern suburb is a place which is neither one thing nor the other; it has neither the advantage of the town nor the open freedom of the country, but manages to combine in nice equality of proportion the disadvantages of both.’²⁴ Holloway earned a rare literary mention in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, 1865. Reginald Wilfer, a clerk in the drug-house of Chicksey, Veneering and Stobbles (a post that would have suited Pooter) lives in Holloway, ‘a tract of suburban Sahara where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by the contractors’.²⁵ Later, Walter Besant in London in the 19th Century, commented on ‘the life of the suburb without any society; no social gatherings or institutions; as dull a life as mankind ever tolerated’.²⁶

In the twentieth century writers have continued the barbs. To E. M. Forster suburbia was ‘a land where nothing had to be striven for and success was indistinguishable from failure’. George Orwell railed against suburbia’s ‘semi-detached torture chambers’ and more recently one character in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes moans: ‘I come from suburbia… and I don’t ever want to go back. It’s the one place in the world that’s further away than anywhere else.’

Few writers other than John Betjeman have had a good word to say about this huge slice of England. Betjeman continually gave support to suburbia, and in two poems, ‘Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody’ and ‘Middlesex’ referred to Diary of a Nobody characters. ‘Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody’ is a paean to the vanishing semi-rural county, nostalgically recalling that when ‘the Pooters walked to Watney Lodge’ the public footpaths ‘used to dodge round elms and oaks to Muswell Hill’, although even here the inclusion of the ‘chuffs of the Great Northern train’ reminds readers of the identity of the culprit responsible for the local changes. In ‘Middlesex’ Betjeman reminiscences about ‘taverns for the bona fide, Cockney Anglers, cockney shooters, Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters’.

But Lupin probably wouldn’t be impressed. To him Holloway, and Brickfield Terrace in particular, is a ‘bit off’. Once he has some money he moves to posh Bayswater just beyond the West End, whereas Pooter celebrates being able to live in Holloway for the rest of his life after Perkupp buys the Laurels’ freehold and presents it to him. Yet it is most likely Lupin who makes the wiser decision; Pooter should have been forewarned by the arrival of the loutish Griffin boys next door. A decade after the Diary was written the outwardly respectable Dr Crippen poisoned his wife in a house on Hilldrop Crescent only a half a mile south. Weedon Grossmith, for one, was well aware of the changes in Holloway in his lifetime. He wrote in his autobiography, From Studio to Stage,²⁷ in 1913 about fishing in the New River less than a mile east of Pooterland at ‘a place with bean fields all around, but all built over 25 years ago’ [i.e, around the time the Diary first appeared in Punch].

In the twentieth century Holloway continued to be developed, so that now almost no parkland or greenery, let alone a bean field, remains, and even the New River has been culverted as it passes near Holloway. The area is also no longer classed as suburban, but inner-city. Of course suburbia is continually on the move, as cities develop. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote: ‘In the south suburbs, at the Elephant it is best to lodge.’ The Elephant (Elephant & Castle) would not have been classed as suburban even by the time The Diary of a Nobody was written. Early in the twentieth century Pooterland moved to what are now termed the ‘leafy suburbs’ – Hillingdon, Hatch End or Havering-atte-Bower – places which make Pooter’s Holloway look like havens of intellectual debate in comparison.²⁸ Pooter’s suburban idyll has given way to a land of congested trunk roads, run-down housing and urban blight, brought about largely by the presence of the Holloway Road (better known as the A1), a traditional exit route from London but which became one of the busiest roads in London.

By the time of Joe Orton’s mid-1960s journal, significantly entitled Diary of a Somebody, Holloway, in one of its few literary mentions, is merely the setting for the dark public toilets where Orton indulges in homosexual encounters. Shortly before Orton wrote his diary, in 1959, Punch published some joke predictions. The most ridiculous was thought to be the one that suggested that the middle classes would move to Islington, the borough which includes Holloway. Punch was slightly wrong. Following the arrival of the fast Victoria Line tube in the late 1960s the middle classes did recolonize Islington but they went for nearby Barnsbury, Canonbury or Highbury Hill, not Holloway, which remains ungentrified. So Lupin Pooter is probably right; Holloway is still ‘a bit off’.