The Diary of a Nobody

decided to go on stage. At a party thrown by Arthur Sullivan he met Richard D’Oyly Carte who soon after dropped him a line promising that ‘if ever art should fail… come to me and I will give you an engagement on the stage at once’. Weedon wasn’t keen at first but had little choice. In September 1885 he made his professional stage debut in Liverpool in a comedy with the Clay-Vokes Company and adapted to the stage so well he later appeared with Henry Irving in the farce Robert Macaire at the Lyceum. Eventually he specialized in playing Pooterish characters. In 1898 George and Weedon appeared together on stage for the only time in the farce Young Mr Yarde and three years later Weedon’s first play, and his most successful, The Night of the Party, which he produced, and for which he also designed the scenery and poster, opened. Weedon’s illustrations in The Diary of a Nobody take the form of thirty-three black-and-white caricatures, mostly in the first half of the book. But none of these appeared in Punch. There the Diary was accompanied by line drawings – cartoons of matchstick figures and the occasional florid design stroke – supplied by J. Priestman Atkinson, a magazine regular. So how much of The Diary of a Nobody did Weedon write? Although his name appears in equal billing in the book (the Punch columns went unsigned) all the payments from the magazine went to George.

The Diary of a Nobody triumphs on a number of levels. Superficially, it can be read as the amusing diary of Charles Pooter, a gauche middle-aged clerk who lives in the north London of the late 1880s, and whose life is the epitome of ordinariness. To readers unacquainted with the culture from which it was born that level could suffice, such is the skill and economy with which it is written. But the Diary is also a careful and clever satire. It sends up not only the self-important Pooter and his ilk, and the growing genre of diaries of self-important people that were all the rage at the time, but also various trends of the day such as Aestheticism and spiritualism. It is also a superbly detailed and memorable portrait of the class system and all the inherent snobbishness of a typical member of the suburban middle classes at that time.

The Diary is that of the fictitious Charles Pooter, a clerk in a commercial office who lives in one of the then new inner London suburbs – Holloway. Over fifteen months beginning in April – it appeared in 1888 although no year is specified in the text – Mr Pooter relates the details of his tedious and unimaginative life which revolves around little more than the dull routine of work and the most banal home-and family-based social life (‘APRIL 11. Mustard-and- cress and radishes not come up yet’). Throughout the book a series of avoidable embarrassing mishaps befall him. He is refused entry to a pub on a Sunday afternoon, even though his friends have no problem getting in, because he hasn’t the sense to tell a precautionary white lie. At the theatre his bow-tie, which he hasn’t fastened securely, drops from the gallery where he is sitting into the pit below. He falls over while dancing at the Lord Mayor’s Ball because the soles of his shoes are too smooth. He is abused by a cabman who takes exception when he reveals he has no money.

Pooter’s world is a comfortable one, a ‘life among Ledgers’ as one character, Burwin-Fosselton, puts it, where anarchy and upheaval come in the shape of insolent tradesmen, incompetent servants, unpredictable friends and a devil-may-care son. Pooter’s world contains no murder, robbery, divorce or wife-beating. The only violent incident, when Pooter receives a ‘hard, intentional punch’ at the back of his head after the lights go out during a supper party, turns out to have been dealt by his friend who thought he was hitting a brick wall. The Diary mentions no newsworthy event of the day. There are no references to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1887) or to the Jack the Ripper murders (1888). There are no allusions to any contemporaneous political debate of the day, such as Irish Home Rule. Indeed there is only one political remark in the book, namely Pooter’s reflection, when he discovers the spendthrift habits of his son’s nouveaux riches friends, that ‘money was not properly divided’. Almost the entire action takes place in the inner London suburbs that were developed during the nineteenth century – Holloway, Muswell Hill, Peckham – with the odd trip to Broadstairs (a suburb on the sea) thrown in. Pooter is a man of no ambition other than to take round the plate in church and for his son, Lupin, to work in the same office. He is happy being a small cog in the wheel of the social and commercial system he supports. For while there are those above him who can never be equalled (his boss, Mr Perkupp, for instance) he knows that beneath him in the social scale are a rabble of tradesmen, errand boys and servants who keep the wheels of the Pooter household oiled.

Pooter’s character is quickly defined. He is naive, vain, mean, prim, pompous, gullible, snobbish and conceited. He is desperate to be thought of as a wit. He is gauche to a degree that beggars belief. But he is also decent, hard-working, loyal, honest and faithful, even if insufferably so. He commits no crimes against the individual or society. Pooter may be the butt of mockery and harmless pranks from friends and colleagues but to Carrie, his long-suffering wife, and to Perkupp, his boss, he is a good man. And after countless Diary entries in which Pooter is shown up for his small-mindedness and incorrigibility the reader eventually warms to him,⁶ and, as William Trevor noted in the Sunday Times,⁷ towards the end of the book ‘we delight in’ Pooter’s personal successes. This leads to the irony that rather than remaining a nobody, Charles Pooter, at the hands of the Grossmiths becomes a somebody, a cultural and literary icon, who merits entries in the Oxford English Dictionary⁸ and regular mentions in the newspapers.⁹

To this day commentators can’t agree whether Pooter is admirable or contemptible. A Daily Telegraph editorial on 24 August 1996 following the start of a dramatized version of the Diary on the radio claimed that ‘this newspaper has always been honoured to be associated with such a decent fellow as Pooter who is not only a comic archetype but also a moral one… the kind of worthy and unglamorous figure on whom Britain’s prosperity was founded. [Pooter’s] values are timeless. He is thrifty, loyal, hard-working and distrustful of those on the make… more Pooters please.’ Two days later Francis Wheen in the Guardian rejected this line: ‘[Pooter] is also petty, snobbish and a crashing bore. We don’t want more Pooters, we have been governed by one [John Major] for six years.’¹⁰

No such confusion exists over the role of the book’s second most prominent character, Pooter’s son, Lupin. Earmarked from birth to follow his father into a secure, if lowly, position, in the same firm, and to ride with Pooter into work each day on the omnibus, Lupin continues to disappoint his father in ever more fanciful ways. Lupin has left home for the windswept cotton-spinning Lancastrian town of Oldham where he works in a bank. On 4 August he returns home without warning, announces that henceforth he will be known only by his middle name, Lupin, in place of Willy, and then when it is time to return North admits that he no longer has a job – ‘I’ve got the chuck!’ At large in the big city Lupin strays further and further from the approved Charles Pooter template, and joins a low comedy troupe, the Holloway Comedians. At a time when going on the stage was considered rather risque and the music- hall beneath contempt for the staid middle class, the conservative, conventional Charles Pooter can no more understand Lupin’s involvement with this distasteful working-class form of entertainment nor the esoteric patter he banters – ‘One, two, three; go! Have you an estate in Greenland?’ – than a latter-day Pooter would empathize with his son’s involvement in psychedelia, punk rock or the latest pop trend.

But Lupin’s feet only tread the boards in his spare time. During the rest of the day his mind is clearly focused on the noble Victorian art of making money. Lupin’s characteristics neatly contrast with his father’s. Charles Pooter is loyal, thrifty, reverent and respectful; Lupin Pooter, as Keith Waterhouse explained in The Collected Letters of a Nobody,¹¹ is ‘capricious, spendthrift, confident, cheerful and a free spirit’. When he does secure a post with Mr Perkupp’s firm he soon recommends their ‘most valued client’ to a rival. Pooter, one can be sure, would rather cut off his own hand than do likewise. Charles Pooter knows and accepts his place in society. Lupin has and wants no such niche. Charles Pooter is distrustful of those on the make. Lupin Pooter is most definitely on the make. In one day he makes ?200 in Parachikka Chlorates shares, double his father’s annual pay-rise. Charles Pooter even fears that Lupin is dangerous or would be ‘if he were older and more influential’ as he reveals after a dinner party in Chapter XX. Lupin displays the values of the 1890s as described by Richard Le Gallienne, member and chronicler of the Aesthetic Movement, namely ‘perversity, artificiality, egoism and curiosity’.¹² Lupin belongs more to the world of Mr Hardfur Huttle, ‘a very clever writer for the American papers’ whom we meet in Chapter XX, who like Lupin can barely wait for the twentieth century to begin, and whose New World vigour ouwits staid Britain as personified by Pooter at the dinner party in Peckham (10 May, year 2).

Of the book’s other characters we perhaps don’t discover enough. Pooter’s ‘dear wife’, Carrie, plays a crucial role in that until the arrival of Lupin in Chapter VI she is the major foil for Pooter. Sometimes she roars with laughter at his jokes; at other times she remains unmoved. Although she is always supportive of her husband in times of