George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody

GEORGE GROSSMITH, son of a law reporter and entertainer, was born in 1847. For some years he worked as a journalist, reporting police court proceedings for The Times , and in 1870 began his career as a singer and entertainer. His special connection with Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, many of the chief parts of which were his ‘creations’, began at the Opéra Comique, and from 1881 onwards he played at the Savoy. Leaving there in 1889, he toured Great Britain and the United States as an entertainer and singer until 1901. His A Society Clown: Reminiscences was published in 1888, followed in 1910 by a further volume of reminiscences, Piano and I: Further Remembrances . He died in 1912.

WEEDON GROSSMITH, brother of George, was born in 1854. He was educated at the Slade and the Royal Academy with a view to following a career as a painter, and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and at the Royal Academy. Joining a theatrical company in 1885, he toured the provinces and America, specializing in the representation of characters of the ‘Mr Pooter’ type. His novel, A Woman with a History , was published in 1896, and the best-known of his many plays, The Night of the Party , in 1901. He eventually took over the management of Terry’s Theatre London, appearing in various parts there and elsewhere until 1917, and died in 1919 in London.

ED GLINERT was born in 1958 and read Classical Hebrew, amongst other subjects, at Manchester University. He has written for Private Eye magazine since 1988, as well as many other publications, including the New Statesman , Radio Times and Independent . He is the co-author of Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler U S A and Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler Great Britain and Ireland , and author of A Literary Guide to London in Penguin.

Evelyn Waugh called it ‘the funniest book in the world’. 1 1 Article in the Daily Mail (28 June 1930). For J. B. Priestley it was ‘true humour… with its mixture of absurdity, irony and affection… a masterpiece, immortal’. 2 2 J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 94. 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 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 . 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 4 Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 372. 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 5 Tony Joseph, George Grossmith, Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol: Tony Joseph, 1982), p. 42.