Notes
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.
A Note on the Text
Punch instalments of The Diary of a Nobody appeared on 26 May 1888; 2, 9, 16, 23 June; 7, 14, 21, 28 July; 18, 25 August; and 1, 15 September. The Diary was then rested until mid November, hence the gap in Pooter’s entries and his outburst for his 30 October entry: ‘I should very much like to know who has wilfully torn the last five or six weeks out of my diary.’ Instalments continued after the break on 17, 24 November; 1, 15, 29 December; 12, 26 January 1889; 2, 9 February; 2, 30 March; and 4, 11 May.
The text of the book version of The Diary of a Nobody closely follows the Punch original but there are some differences. The Punch instalments began with the preface: ‘As everybody who is anybody is publishing reminiscences, diaries, notes, autobiographies and recollections we are sincerely grateful to A Nobody for permitting us to add to the historical collection.’ The book replaces this with the paragraph beginning ‘Why should I not publish my diary?’
The magazine’s opening instalment and the book’s first chapter both open with the Pooters moving into their new home in Holloway. The first Punch instalment ends with Pooter ordering fresh eggs (7 April) and so the book’s 8 April entry, with the Curate catching his foot in the scraper, is new. Punch’s second instalment neatly coincides with the second chapter of the book but the link between magazine instalment and book chapter breaks down soon after.
Scenes added for the book which didn’t appear in the original include the one in which Pooter’s tie falls into the pit at the Tank Theatre (23 April), and much of the Mansion House Ball scene (7 May). The Punch original ended with Farmerson saying to Pooter: ‘Pardon me, Mr Pooter, no shop when we’re in company, please.’ So, the sheriff’s reunion with Farmerson, Pooter’s snobbish reaction to it and Pooter’s slipping over during the dance were freshly written for the book. The whole of the book’s Chapter XI – Burwin-Fosselton, Padge and the Henry Irving impersonations – were new. There were also some minor changes of date for the book, sorting out mistakes in the calendar made in the Punch original.
The main change though comes at the end of the book. The Punch episodes ended with the 21 March entry, ‘Today I shall conclude my diary…’ in which Lupin is taken on at Perkupp’s firm. In book form, however, there are seven new chapters following this Punch ending. Lupin’s position at Perkupp’s doesn’t work out, he gets a new, better paid job and gets engaged to Miss Posh. Pooter’s promise to conclude the Diary back in March now looks very odd, not that this hiccup detracts from the qualities of the Diary or the clever new ending in which Pooter again finds happiness.
Further Reading
Faber & Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Brett (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). An unintentionally funny compendium of diaries by people from all backgrounds
– the famous through to the ‘nobodies’ – including Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, the Revd James Woodforde et al, and presented on a day-by-day basis. Many entries are so Pooterish they could have been out-takes from The Diary of a Nobody.
Tony Joseph, George Grossmith, Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol: Tony Joseph, 1982). Not a heavyweight biography, but suitable enough for its subject although more useful for Gilbert & Sullivan historians than Diary of a Nobody lovers.
J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976). A readable and lucid commentary on English humour throughout the ages with an extract from The Diary of a Nobody.
David Thorns, Suburbia (London: Paladin, 1972). One of many good accounts of how the strange English landscape called suburbia arose, particularly during Victorian times.
Keith Waterhouse, The Collected Letters of a Nobody (London: Michael Joseph, 1986). In The Diary of a Nobody Pooter alludes to writing some twenty letters, none of which we see. Waterhouse takes this as his cue and writes these letters as Pooter may have done. He also creates many more, corresponding with the manager of the local railway line about the excessive number of trains passing by that aren’t listed in Bradshaw’s timetable, to Jerome K. Jerome urging him not to publish an account of a boating holiday, to a variety of tradesmen, neighbours, Cummings and Gowing, and of course to the editor of the Blackfriars Bi-Weekly News complaining about the misspelling of his name. The funniest are those involving Lupin. At one stage Waterhouse’s Pooter writes to a Dr Hector M’Gallum at Freshfields Asylum for Idiots & Imbeciles ‘on behalf of a friend’ who has a ‘highly-strung’ son: ‘Is there any pill… that may be obtained which could be given to the boy to quieten him down?’
——, Mrs. Pooter’s Diary (London: Michael Joseph, 1983). Waterhouse believes we know too little about Carrie – what she thinks of her husband, his awkwardness, bad jokes, dead-end job, lack of ambition and incorrigible friends. What does she do all day while he’s at the office? In Waterhouse’s ingenious book she keeps a diary based largely on plot lines hinted at but not followed through in The Diary of a Nobody.
THE DIARY OF A NOBODY originally appeared in Punch, and is re-published by permission of the publishers, Messrs Bradbury and Agnew. The Diary has been since considerably added to. The excellent title was suggested by our mutual friend
F. C. BURNAND,
to whom we have the great pleasure of dedicating this volume.
GEORGE GROSSMITH
WEEDON GROSSMITH
London, June, 1892.
Contents
CHAPTER I. We settle down in our new home, and I resolve to keep a diary. Tradesmen trouble us a bit, so does the scraper. The curate calls and pays me a great compliment.
CHAPTER II. Tradesmen and the scraper still troublesome. Gowing rather tiresome with his complaints of the paint. I make one of the best jokes of my life. Delights of gardening. Mr Stillbrook, Gowing, Cummings, and I have a little misunderstanding. Sarah makes me look a fool before Cummings.
CHAPTER III. A conversation with Mr Merton on society. Mr and Mrs James, of Sutton, come up. A miserable evening at the Tank Theatre. Experiments with enamel paint. I make another good joke; but Gowing and Cummings are unnecessarily offended. I paint the bath red, with unexpected result.
CHAPTER IV. The ball at the Mansion House.
CHAPTER V. After the Mansion House Ball. Carrie offended. Gowing also offended. A pleasant party at the Cummings’. Mr Franching, of Peckham, visits us.
CHAPTER VI. The unexpected arrival home of our son, Willie Lupin Pooter.
CHAPTER VII. Home again. Mrs James’s influence on Carrie. Can get nothing for Lupin. Next-door neighbours are a little troublesome. Someone tampers with my diary. Got a place for Lupin. Lupin startles us with an announcement.
CHAPTER VIII. Daisy Mutlar sole topic of conversation. Lupin’s new berth. Fireworks at the Cummings’. The ‘Holloway Comedians’. Sarah quarrels with the charwoman. Lupin’s uncalled-for interference. Am introduced to Daisy Mutlar. We decide to give a party in her honour.
CHAPTER IX. Our first important party. Old friends and new friends. Gowing is a little annoying; but his friend, Mr Stillbrook, turns out to be quite amusing. Inopportune arrival of Mr Perkupp, but he is most kind and complimentary. Party a great success.
CHAPTER X. Reflections. I make another good joke. Am annoyed at the constant serving-up of the blanc-mange. Lupin expresses his opinion of weddings. Lupin falls out with Daisy Mutlar.
CHAPTER XI. We have a dose of Irving’s imitations. Make the acquaintance of a Mr Padge. Don’t care for him. Mr Burwin-Fosselton becomes a nuisance.
CHAPTER XII. A serious discussion concerning the use and value of my diary. Lupin’s opinion of ’Xmas. Lupin’s unfortunate engagement is on again.
CHAPTER XIII. I receive an insulting Christmas card. We spend a pleasant Christmas at Carrie’s mother’s. A Mr Moss is rather too free. A boisterous evening, during which I am struck in the dark. I receive an extraordinary letter from Mr Mutlar, senior, respecting Lupin. We miss drinking out the old year.
CHAPTER XIV. Begin the year with an unexpected promotion at the office. I make two good jokes. I get an enormous rise in my salary. Lupin speculates successfully and starts a pony-trap. Have to speak to Sarah. Extraordinary conduct of Gowing’s.
CHAPTER XV. Gowing explains his conduct. Lupin takes us for a drive, which we don’t enjoy. Lupin introduces us to Mr Murray Posh.
CHAPTER XVI. We lose money over Lupin’s advice as to investment, so does Cummings. Murray Posh engaged to Daisy Mutlar.
CHAPTER XVII. Marriage of Daisy Mutlar and Murray Posh. The dream of my life realized. Mr Perkupp takes Lupin into the office.
CHAPTER XVIII. Trouble with a stylographic pen. We go to a Volunteer Ball, where I am let in for an expensive supper. Grossly insulted by a cabman. An odd invitation to Southend.
CHAPTER XIX. Meet Teddy Finsworth, an old school-fellow. We have a pleasant and quiet dinner at his uncle’s, marred only by a few awkward mistakes on my part respecting Mr Finsworth’s pictures. A discussion on dreams.
CHAPTER XX. Dinner at Franching’s to meet Mr Hardfur Huttle.
CHAPTER XXI. Lupin is discharged. We are in great trouble. Lupin gets engaged elsewhere at a handsome salary.
CHAPTER XXII. Master Percy Edgar Smith James. Mrs James (of Sutton) visits us again and introduces ‘spiritual séances’.
CHAPTER XXIII. Lupin leaves us. We dine at his new apartments, and hear some extraordinary information respecting the wealth of Mr Murray Posh. Meet Miss Lilian Posh. Am sent for by Mr Hardfur Huttle. Important.
CHAPTER THE LAST. One of the happiest days of my life.
Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ – why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.
CHARLES POOTER
The Laurels,
Brickfield Terrace,
Holloway.
We settle down in our
new home, and I resolve to keep
a diary. Tradesmen trouble us a bit, so
does the scraper. The curate calls and
pays me a great compliment.
Chapter I
My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house, ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway – a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door, which, by-the-by, we keep locked with the chain up. Cummings, Gowing, and our other intimate friends always come to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking her from her work. We have a nice little back garden which runs down to the railway.1 We were rather afraid of the noise of the trains at first, but the landlord said we should not notice them after a bit, and took £2 off the rent.2 He was certainl
y right; and beyond the cracking of the garden wall at the bottom, we have suffered no inconvenience.
After my work in the City, I like to be at home. What’s the good of a home, if you are never in it? ‘Home, Sweet Home’, that’s my motto. I am always in of an evening. Our old friend Gowing may drop in without ceremony; so may Cummings, who lives opposite. My dear wife Caroline and I are pleased to see them, if they like to drop in on us. But Carrie and I can manage to pass our evenings together without friends. There is always something to be done: a tin-tack here, a Venetian blind to put straight, a fan to nail up, or part of a carpet to nail down – all of which I can do with my pipe in my mouth; while Carrie is not above putting a button on a shirt, mending a pillow-case, or practising the ‘Sylvia Gavotte’ on our new cottage piano (on the three years’ system), manufactured by W. Bilkson (in small letters), from Collard and Collard (in very large letters). It is also a great comfort to us to know that our boy Willie is getting on so well in the Bank at Oldham.3 We should like to see more of him. Now for my diary:
The Laurels
APRIL 3.4 Tradesmen called for custom, and I promised Farmerson, the ironmonger, to give him a turn if I wanted any nails or tools. By-the-by, that reminds me there is no key to our bedroom door, and the bells must be seen to. The parlour bell is broken, and the front door rings up in the servant’s bedroom, which is ridiculous. Dear friend Gowing dropped in, but wouldn’t stay, saying there was an infernal smell of paint.
George Grossmith Page 3
