I fervently hope it will bring good luck to us all.
It was two o’clock when I got home. Although I was so tired, I could not sleep except for short intervals – then only to dream.
I kept dreaming of Mr Perkupp and Mr Huttle. The latter was in a lovely palace with a crown on. Mr Perkupp was waiting in the room. Mr Huttle kept taking off his crown and handing it to me, and calling me ‘President’.
He appeared to take no notice of Mr Perkupp, and I kept asking Mr Huttle to give the crown to my worthy master. Mr Huttle kept saying: ‘No, this is the White House of Washington, and you must keep your crown, Mr President.’
We all laughed long and very loudly, till I got parched, and then I woke up. I fell asleep, only to dream the same thing over and over again.
One of the happiest days of
my life.
Chapter the Last
JULY 10. The excitement and anxiety through which I have gone the last few days have been almost enough to turn my hair grey. It is all but settled. Tomorrow the die will be cast. I have written a long letter to Lupin – feeling it my duty to do so, – regarding his attention to Mrs Posh, for they drove up to our house again last night.
JULY 11. I find my eyes filling with tears as I pen the note of my interview this morning with Mr Perkupp. Addressing me, he said: ‘My faithful servant, I will not dwell on the important service you have done our firm. You can never be sufficiently thanked. Let us change the subject. Do you like your house, and are you happy where you are?’
I replied: ‘Yes, sir; I love my house and I love the neighbourhood, and could not bear to leave it.’
Mr Perkupp, to my surprise, said: ‘Mr Pooter, I will purchase the freehold of that house, and present it to the most honest and most worthy man it has ever been my lot to meet.’
He shook my hand, and said he hoped my wife and I would be spared many years to enjoy it. My heart was too full to thank him; and, seeing my embarrassment, the good fellow said: ‘You need say nothing, Mr Pooter,’ and left the office.
I sent telegrams to Carrie, Gowing, and Cummings (a thing I have never done before), and asked the two latter to come round to supper.
On arriving home I found Carrie crying with joy, and I sent Sarah round to the grocer’s to get two bottles of ‘Jackson Frères’.
My two dear friends came in the evening, and the last post brought a letter from Lupin in reply to mine. I read it aloud to them all. It ran: ‘My dear old Guv., – Keep your hair on. You are on the wrong tack again. I am engaged to be married to “Lillie Girl”. I did not mention it last Thursday, as it was not definitely settled. We shall be married in August, and amongst our guests we hope to see your old friends Gowing and Cummings. With much love to all, from The same old Lupin.’
THE END
Notes
Chapter I
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
Chapter II
1. (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.’
2. (April 11) Sarah, our servant: By 1890 the number of servants in Britain had peaked at around one and a half million.
3. (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.
4. (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.
5. (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.
Chapter III
1. (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.
2. (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.
Chapter IV
1. (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.
Chapter V
1. (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.
2. (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.
3. (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.
4. (June 7) our views of Japan: Japanese fashions became all the rage towards the en
d 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.
5. (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.
6. (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.
Chapter VI
1. (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.
Chapter VII
1. (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.
2. (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.
3. (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.
Chapter VIII
1. (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.
2. (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’.
3. (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.
4. (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.’
Chapter X
1. (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.
Chapter XI
1. (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.
Chapter XII
1. (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.
2. (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.
Chapter XVI
1. (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.
Chapter XVII
1. (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.
Chapter XVIII
1. (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.’
2. (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’.
Chapter XXII
1. (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.
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