George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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 .

(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’.

(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.

(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.’

(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.

(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.