The Diary of a Nobody

1

Article in the Daily Mail (28 June 1930).

2

J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 94.

3

Arrowsmith had also published George Grossmith’s own recollections, A Society Clown, and that other late Victorian tour de force of gentle humour, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

4

Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 372.

5

Tony Joseph, George Grossmith, Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol: Tony Joseph, 1982), p. 42.

6

The turning-point in our attitude towards Pooter comes on 21 March when Lupin, still smarting from losing his fiancée to a rival suitor, Murray Posh, from the hat-making family of the same name, lets out his frustration on a Posh hat he owns. At first Pooter is shocked by Lupin’s violent behaviour, but when he picks up the hat and finds the motif ‘Posh’s Patent’ he sympathizes with the boy’s plight. That this rare display of compassion comes three-quarters of the way through the book seems odd until one realizes that this scene was part of the original ending of the Diary when it first came out in Punch.

7

Sunday Times (23 February 1997).

8

The Oxford English Dictionary lists under ‘Pooterish’: ‘So many square miles of vapid and banal and Pooterish suburbs’ (taken from the Times Literary Supplement, 31 December 1976), and refers to George VI’s deadpan account of Pooterish bishops blundering through his coronation (taken from The Times, 14 May 1977).

9

In recent years articles in broadsheet newspapers have regularly compared public figures to the hero of The Diary of a Nobody. For instance, the Guardian in 1995 described footballer Alan Shearer’s Diary of a Season as like ‘Pooter without the laughs’. Two years later Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, was described in a Sunday Telegraph review of his book, Creative Britain, as a ‘Pooter of the Arts’.

10

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when John Major was first compared with Pooter but the idea probably came from the satirical magazine Private Eye which usually produces a spoof diary as the popular caricature of the prime minister of the day might write it. Soon after John Major took office in November 1990 the Eye began running ‘The Secret Diary of John Major aged 47¾’ undisguisedly based on Sue Townshend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾. Since Mole is obviously a younger, 1980s version of Pooter, commentators eventually began comparing the prime minister with the hero of The Diary of a Nobody. One of the first to do so was Roy Hattersley who nearly became prime minister himself in the 1980s. He made the comparison in his Guardian column in 1991 after seeing Major on TV telling a desert prince that the coffee was ‘extremely agreeable’.

These comparisons continued until the end of Major’s premiership. Andrew Moncur in the Guardian Diary for 31 March 1997 wrote: ‘It would be interesting to hear what John Major, the Mr Pooter of Downing Street, has to say on the topic of ritzy hotels.’ A Financial Times review of Anthony Seldon’s Major, A Political Life on 14 November 1997 was headlined ‘Mr Pooter’s Place in History’.

11

Keith Waterhouse, The Collected Letters of a Nobody (London: Michael Joseph, 1986).

12

Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London: Putnam & Co, 1951).

13

Keith Waterhouse, Mrs Pooter’s Diary (London: Michael Joseph, 1983). Also see Further Reading.

14

This led J. B. Priestley to describe Padge as ‘the most laconic character in English Literature’ in English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 98.

15

George Grossmith published his own recollections, A Society Clown (Bristol: Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library, 1888) that same year. Ironically, since he never kept a diary, it was done largely from memory.

16

Faber & Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Brett (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 23.

17

Ibid., p. 271.

18

Ibid., p. 308.

19

Raymond Chapman, The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832–1901 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968).

20

David Thorns, Suburbia (London: Paladin, 1972), p. 38.

21

Ibid., p. 38.

22

The London Encyclopaedia, edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (London: Macmillan, 1983).

23

As Jenni Calder explained in The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), by the 1880s ‘vast tracts of London’s suburbs were created for the growing army of clerks who were needed to maintain the running of business’.

24

Quoted by F. M. L. Thompson in The Rise of Suburbia, 1982.

25

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), Book The First, Chapter 4.

26

Walter Besant, London in the 19th Century (London: A&C Black, 1909).

27

Weedon Grossmith, From Studio to Stage (London: John Lane, 1913).

28

In Pooter’s day suburbs like Holloway may have been mocked as parvenus but within such places many of the most influential new movements, such as women’s rights, germinated, as T. W. H. Crosland identified in The Suburbans (London: John Lane, 1905). This well of new ideas evaporated when suburbia was forced out to the London fringes in the 1930s. Since then suburbia has become associated with a dearth of ideas and a particularly reactionary lifestyle as captured in countless television sitcoms.

29

which runs down to the railway: Which railway line lies at the bottom of the Pooters’ garden? As there would have been no terrace of houses by the main King’s Cross line which runs through southern Holloway it is far more likely that the Laurels is situated alongside the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction spur of the North London Line in Upper Holloway. This spur is barely used now and even then was far from rich in passenger traffic. But it has always been used for freight, especially after dark, which must have caused the Pooters a few sleepless nights, although only Lupin (in Chapter VI) admits as much. Ironically, Pooter could have taken a property only half a mile away in Drayton Park for a similar rent, without any loss of social standing and lived by a railway line which would have afforded him a quicker connection to the City than the horse-drawn omnibus he takes daily. Only a Pooter would be so badly prepared in choosing a new address.

30

and took £2 off the rent: The Pooters are happy to rent. The idea of owning one’s own home did not apply so widely then. See Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977). Nor was renting confined to the lower-middle classes. Charles Dickens, for instance, rented nearly all his London addresses.

31

in the Bank at Oldham: Oldham, 200 miles north of London and several degrees colder, was then at the hub of England’s cotton-spinning industry.

32

APRIL 3: Beginning the Diary on 1 April would have been too obvious, but starting around this time is appropriate. The beginning of April is also the beginning of the financial year, as Pooter, and Lupin, particularly, would have been aware.

33

(April 10) It is disgraceful how late some of the young clerks are at arriving: In 1879 George Grossmith had appeared in an adaptation of the farce Cox and Box by Punch editor F. C. Burnand in which he had to perform a song which opened ‘My master is punctual always in business.’

34

(April 11) Sarah, our servant: By 1890 the number of servants in Britain had peaked at around one and a half million.

35

(April 15) a good long walk over Hampstead and Finchley: Weedon Grossmith talks about going on such a walk in From Studio to Stage. Even today such a walk, from Upper Holloway to Hampstead and Finchley, would be pleasant, taking in Highgate Village, Ken Wood and Hampstead Garden Suburb (not built when The Diary of a Nobody was written). The last stretch, to Finchley, across the North Circular Road would however be rather irksome.

36

(April 15) Gowing suggested that we should make for ‘The Cow and Hedge’: The Cow and Hedge is an obvious pun on The Old Bull and Bush, a perennially popular pub on North End Road by Hampstead Heath with which the Grossmiths, having been raised locally, would doubtless have been acquainted, and which at the time the Diary was written would have been one of the few buildings in the area. The pub, a favourite of Hogarth, David Garrick, Reynolds and Dickens, was immortalized in Florrie Ford’s 1903 song ‘Down at the Old Bull & Bush’, now considered to be a standard from the period.

37

(April 15) ‘That’s all right – bona-fide travellers ’: Until 1914 the law allowed only those who had travelled more than three miles a drink out of hours on Sundays. Only those of the lowest morality, i.e. not Pooter, would fib about the distance they had come.

38

(April 21) the Italian Opera, Haymarket, Savoy, or Lyceum: A month previously (i.e. in March 1888) the Pooters would have been able to see both George and Weedon Grossmith appearing in Sheridan’s The Critic at the Haymarket. The Savoy was of course the setting for many of George Grossmith’s greatest performances in the Gilbert & Sullivan operas.

39

(April 27) he only called to leave me the Bicycle News: A decade earlier bicycling had been dominated by the cumbersome and risible penny-farthings, but by the 1880s important developments in the construction of the modern bicycle had been made. In 1885 the first practical safety bicycle with the rear wheel operated by a chain was invented, and three years later J. B. Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre. As a result bicycling’s popularity amongst all classes rose.

40

(April 30) an invitation for Carrie and myself from the Lord and Lady Mayoress to the Mansion House: George Grossmith was well acquainted with this place, having met Mark Twain there at a banquet in 1880, and having attended a function for theatre people inside in June 1887.

41

(May 12) but the stupid people had mentioned our names as ‘Mr and Mrs C. Porter’. Most annoying!: George Grossmith often had to complain about the misspelling of his own name which would come out as Grousesmith, Goosesmith, Ghostsmith or Grogsmith.

42

(June 4) Mrs Cummings sang five or six songs, ‘No Sir’ and ‘The Garden of Sleep’: These were two contemporary favourites. George Grossmith wrote and sang a parody of the latter entitled ‘Thou of My Thou’ at a show performed in front of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) at the Portland Hall, Southsea, in September 1889.

43

(June 4) especially the verse referring to Mr Gladstone: Gladstone, a Liberal, had been prime minister until 1885. At the time the Diary was written Lord Salisbury, a Conservative, was in office.

44

(June 7) our views of Japan: Japanese fashions became all the rage towards the end of the nineteenth century as contact with the hitherto obscure islands increased following Mutsuhito’s ascent to the throne in 1868 and the abolition of feudalism three years later. Another George Grossmith connection was Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), set in the imaginary Japanese town of Titipu, which opened with Grossmith playing the Lord High Executioner.

45

(July 31) “Good old Broadstairs”: Broadstairs, on the Kent coast, 60 miles east of London, has traditionally been quiet and genteel, especially compared to nearby Margate, the main Kentish resort, which even then was considered a touch vulgar. When the Pooters eventually get to Broadstairs (Chapter VI) Pooter wears a frock coat with a straw helmet, much to Lupin’s embarrassment.

46

(August 3) Carrie bought a parasol about five feet long: Very contemporary. In 1888 5-foot handles were all the rage. Even then Pooter, as behind the times as ever, thinks it ridiculous.

47

(August 5) and taken the second name “Lupin”: William Pooter’s decision to adopt a name from the distaff side matches Weedon Grossmith’s decision as a young man to drop his given Christian name, Walter, and adopt a family name. Given young Pooter’s interest in the theatre the Grossmiths may have chosen the name Lupin in acknowledgement of the Lupinos, a theatrical family of Italian origin who came to England in 1642.

48

(August 23) I bought a pair of stags’ heads: There was a Victorian fashion for Caledonian touches thanks partly to the popularity of Walter Scott.

49

(October 30) I should very much like to know who has wilfully torn the last five or six weeks out of my diary: With Punch having dropped the Diary for two months in the autumn of 1888 this was an amusing way for Pooter to explain the gap.

50

(November 2) and shouting out, ‘See me dance the polka!’: ‘See Me Dance the Polka’ was George Grossmith’s most successful song composition, in terms of royalties.

51

(November 6) in the firm of Job Cleanands and Co.: A pun on the name of Frank Burnand, the Punch editor who commissioned The Diary of a Nobody.

52

(November 10) and totally disapproved of amateur theatricals: Pooter’s misgivings about Lupin’s going on the stage were bizarrely mirrored in real life by George Grossmith’s own attitude to his son, George Grossmith III, who took a role in the W. S. Gilbert/ George Grossmith collaboration, Haste to the Wedding, in 1892, the year the Diary was published in book form. When Grossmith heard that his son had been offered £2 10/ – he replied, ‘the boy has no experience whatsoever and from what I can judge of him will probably be no good. Give him a pound’.

53

(November 11) Sarah had accused Mrs Birrell of tearing the pages out of my diary to wrap up some kitchen fat: Some fifty years previously John Stuart Mill had borrowed from Thomas Carlyle the manuscript of his epic work on the French Revolution. Mill’s maid, thinking it was scrap paper, used it for lighting the fire and Carlyle, who by then had lost interest in the work, thinking it finished, was obliged to write it again.

54

(November 14) in a nice letter which I shall keep: In his autobiography, A Society Clown, George Grossmith revealed: ‘I must plead guilty to… keeping in my desk, every letter addressed to me personally.’

55

(November 18) I told Carrie, when we were alone, if that blanc-mange were placed on the table again I should walk out of the house: As Francis Wheen pointed out in the Guardian (26 August 1996) Pooter treats his maid appallingly, in a way reminiscent of Friedrich Engels’ claim in The Condition of the Working Class in England that ‘It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working men starve or not, if only he makes money.’ Families like the Pooters were supposed to provide full board for their servants and inevitably in some cases sustenance amounted to little more than the householders’ left-overs with the servants obliged to fill out their diet from their already paltry wages. Perhaps Sarah has been given nothing to eat other than the blanc-mange, and is subtly trying to point this out by continually placing it back on Pooter’s table uneaten.

56

(November 22) He began doing the Irving business all through supper: Burwin-Fosselton’s prolix impersonations of the celebrated actor Henry Irving (1838–1905) were based on the experiences of both brothers. George Grossmith regularly did skits of ‘Henry Irving and his Leetle Dog’, once before Queen Victoria. Weedon Grossmith also performed Irving impersonations as a party piece. In 1888, shortly before this section of the Diary was written, Irving asked Weedon, who was then doing comic roles on stage, if he’d like to play alongside him in a production of the farce Robert Macaire. The part required Weedon to imitate Irving, which he found difficult to do in front of the great man. When Weedon overcame his nerves and began the impersonation the cast collapsed in hysterics. Irving, somewhat dismayed, pushed Weedon so hard he nearly fell off stage. Eventually the actor saw the funny side of it and the play, with Weedon’s impersonation included, was performed successfully. In 1895 Henry Irving became the first actor to be knighted, the stage at which according to Joe Orton some seventy years later ‘the theatre started going downhill’. (Tony Joseph, George Grosssmith, Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol: Tony Joseph, 1982), pp. 159–60.

57

(December 18) ‘I am sure it would prove quite as interesting as some of the ridiculous reminiscences that have been published lately’: A nice dig at the main author; only a few months previously George Grossmith’s own memoirs, A Society Clown, had appeared.

58

(December 21) I left the room with silent dignity but caught my foot in the mat: This was based on an incident from Weedon’s youth when his father spotted that he’d been drinking and Weedon, trying to slink out of the room to go to bed, caught his foot in the rug and fell on the floor.

59

(February 20) ‘Great Failure of Stock and Share Dealers!’: In a well-known news story of the day a Kimberley diamond magnate, Barney Barnato, gambled away a fortune in other people’s money and then threw himself into the sea from a boat moored off the African coast.

60

(March 21) Today I shall conclude my diary: This entry, with Charles Pooter’s greatest ambition fulfilled, namely to have Lupin work alongside him at Perkupp’s firm, was originally the last of the Punch instalments. Now it just looks like a false ending.

61

(April 16) the cabman, who was a rough bully: George Grossmith wrote a song, ‘He was a Careful Man’, which included the lines ‘He knew how cabmen will impose if people don’t take care/By charging for a mile or two beyond the proper fare.’

62

(April 16) as I intend writing to the Telegraph: To this day some people, including the Daily Telegraph, haven’t got the joke. The authors are mocking the kind of self-important person, the precursor of the modern-day ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, who writes to that newspaper over some trifling injustice. The Telegraph claimed this incident as a PR coup in a 1996 editorial in which they declared their honour at being ‘associated with such a decent fellow’.

63

(May 30) I found Carrie buried in a book on Spiritualism, called There is no Birth, by Florence Singleyet: Spiritualism, very popular during Victorian times – even Queen Victoria partook – was introduced to Britain in 1852 from the United States. As J. B. Priestley explained in Victoria’s Heyday: ‘In every town there were darkened rooms in which luminous spirit faces appeared, musical instruments played themselves, strange voices were heard prophesying… spiritualism and its miracles were all the rage’ (J. B. Priestley, Victoria’s Heyday, London: Heinemann, 1972).

When Pooter returns home from work on 30 May he finds Carrie reading There is No Birth, by Florence Singleyet. The latter’s name is a crude pun on that of George Grossmith’s stage partner, Florence Marryat, an ardent spiritualist who persuaded George to take part in a séance in 1876 (an experience he found impossible to take seriously) and who later wrote a book called There is No Death.