trouble the reader longs for more than a cursory view on her husband’s problems, which is probably why Keith Waterhouse went to such trouble to pen Mrs Pooter’s Diary.13 Pooter’s main servant, Sarah, is as unimportant to events as Mrs Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, while Gowing and Cummings, Pooter’s two regular visitors, serve as little more than conduits for contemporary fashions. Cummings is the biking freak while Gowing is big on games – billiards and more esoteric pastimes like Cutlets (see Chapter VI for an explanation of its mysteries). But essentially we find out little about them, either because Pooter himself is not interested, or more likely because the Grossmiths didn’t want too much distracting from what William Trevor called the ‘monumental presence’ of Pooter.
As satire The Diary of a Nobody fits into the Horatian rather than the Juvenalian tradition, i.e. mocking folly rather than attacking evil. In the English tradition its satirical edge is closer to that of eighteenth-century writers such as Pope and Swift than epic mid-Victorian quasi-satirical novelists like Dickens and Trollope. Its humour develops not so much from the reader’s sense of schadenfreude at Pooter’s misunderstandings but from our hero’s reaction to them. When the bath water turns red Pooter’s first thought is that he has ruptured an artery ‘and was bleeding to death’. Most people would just remember recently painting the bath red. At the Lord Mayor’s Ball one of the sheriffs slaps Farmerson, Pooter’s ironmonger, on the back and hails him as an old friend. Pooter is astonished. But as the surprise begins to wears off for the reader Pooter delivers the coup de grace – ‘to think that a man who mends our scraper should know any member of our aristocracy!’ But for those who just want to laugh at Pooter’s blunders there are countless examples liberally sprinkled throughout the book. When he finds that the Blackfriars Bi-weekly News has left him off the list of those attending the Lord Mayor’s Ball he writes to complain. The result is that the paper misspells his name. He complains about that so the paper misspells it again, differently – twice. Buying Christmas cards in a drapers store on the Strand he sides with an attendant over careless shoppers who spoil cards only for his own coat-sleeve to get caught up in a pile of expensive Christmas cards which he knocks over and damages. The shop is then obliged to sell off the cards cheaply.
At the East Acton Volunteer Ball he is accosted by a waiter who wants ?30s. 6d for the food and drink that Pooter’s party has consumed. Pooter is mortified. He had assumed that everything was free. So, through his own naivety he is obliged to pay for two people he hardly knows. There are fewer examples of humour incidental to Pooter, but one often cited involves the ridiculous Padge ‘who appeared to be all moustache’. A loose acquaintance of Pooter’s friend Gowing, Padge appears for the first time on 23 November to witness Burwin-Fosselton’s impersonations of Henry Irving. He takes the best armchair and says nothing all evening other than ‘That’s right’ to every statement.14 Padge turns up uninvited the next night but his vocabulary has not increased. We then forget Padge but he reappears six months later at the East Acton Volunteer Ball where he slaps Pooter on the shoulder and shakes his hand. The joke is reworked expertly for when Pooter inquires, ‘Mr Padge I believe?’ he replies, ‘That’s right’. Other aspects of the book’s humour are more arcane, particularly the snatches of theatrical and music-hall banter regularly cracked by Lupin Pooter and his pals from the Holloway Comedians.
The Diary of a Nobody sends up a number of popular late nineteenth-century trends that needed debunking: particularly the notion of the Very Important Diary. By the 1880s anyone who was anyone, from the deservedly famous to the semi-prominent and the downright forgettable, was producing their memoirs, and by the time The Diary of a Nobody first appeared Punch was running spoof diaries of a dyspeptic, a pessimist, a duffer and an MP, and so accompanying the first instalment of the Diary in Punch the editor included the rider: ‘Everybody who is anybody is publishing reminiscences, diaries, notes, autobiographies and recollections…’ 15
Those lampooned in The Diary of a Nobody for their painstaking recording of the banal and trivial include Dearman Birchall, a cloth merchant, William Macready, actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1840s, and Henry Crabb Robinson, a barrister and war correspondent for The Times. For instance, Dearman Birchall records under 19 January 1882: ‘Fancy dress ball to open the entertaining room at Barnwood. I was dressed as Mahomet Bel Hadgi, the father, and Emily as the mother of Lindaraja. We were not recognised at first,’16 a calamity with which Pooter would have wholeheartedly sympathized. Macready’s entry for 29 July 1837 reads: ‘Walked to Oxford St, took cab home. The cabman insisted on 2/– [fare] which I resisted; and on his persistence I made him drive me to the police office, where a deposit was made for the measurement of the ground. I walked home.’17 Compare this with Charles Pooter’s plight at the hands of the hostile cabman after the East Acton Volunteer Ball. Then there was Henry Crabb Robinson who records how on 27 August 1864 ‘The day was devoted to looking over old letters – a necessary task and the sense of its being a duty almost its only inducement.’18 Again one doesn’t have to imagine too hard to visualize Pooter spending a day doing likewise.
A more sophisticated antecedent is the Revd James Woodforde’s Diary of a Country Parson 1758– 1802. Woodforde kept an almost daily record of his largely uneventful life during this 44-year period, commenting on such cataclysmic events as the storming of the Bastille alongside coverage of what he’d had for breakfast that day. But even Woodforde wasn’t averse to dropping in the kind of observation that can only be described as Pooterish. On 2 May 1788 (just over a hundred years to the day before Pooter’s arrival) he reveals: ‘My little cart was brought home from being painted and now looks very smart indeed. It is of a very dark green.’ Charles Pooter with his enthusiasm about painting the bath red (27 April, year 1) would have been proud of such an entry. Nor is The Diary of a Nobody the last in the line. Out of a host of descendants the two most important late twentieth-century examples are Sue Townshend’s Adrian Mole and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, both of whom have appeared heading hugely popular best-selling spoof diaries firmly in the Pooter tradition of naive hero at a loss to explain the mundane nature of their own tightly defined world.
Other Victorian preoccupations of the time which are expertly caricatured in The Diary of a Nobody include bicycling (Cummings’s entire life-story appears to be replayed through Bicycle News, which nobody else reads), spiritualism, introduced to the Pooter household by the dread hand of ‘Mrs James of Sutton’, and the Aesthetic Movement, the leading counter-culture tendency of the time. A revolt against the trend towards standardization and mass production, the Aesthetic Movement railed against the strict moral standards of the time, rejoicing in the tag ‘art for art’s sake’. The Aesthetic Movement developed in the late 1870s around the ideas of the critic and essayist Walter Pater, and soon attracted that most flamboyant and dandyish of late nineteenth-century figures, Oscar Wilde. Long before The Diary of a Nobody Wilde was being sent up in Punch in cartoons and skits. In 1881 Punch editor Frank Burnand wrote a comedy called The Colonel which included a character, Lambert Stryke (played by Beerbohm Tree) who was a send-up of Oscar Wilde. That year George Grossmith began playing the poet Reginald Bunthorne complete with knee-breeches a la Wilde and a wig with one single white lock a la Whistler in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience. Another Wilde influence on The Diary of a Nobody emerged from the poet’s taste in interior design. In 1884 Wilde moved into a house on Tite Street, Chelsea, and with the aid of James Whistler and the architect Edward Godwin painted almost everything white – the front door, hall, stairs – and, as Wilde explained, ‘different shades of white in the dining room’. It was not the sort of thing people did in those days, and so in The Diary of a Nobody Charles Pooter sees himself as being particularly risque when he paints much of the house – flower pots, the servant’s bedroom furniture, the coal-scuttle, ‘the backs of our Shakespeare’ and, most absurdly, the bath, in red.
There are other Aesthetic Movement influences evident in The Diary of a Nobody. As Raymond Chapman explained in The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832– 1901,19 ‘touches of frivolity became permissible even in the suburban villa’, and so even though Pooter is unlikely to be conversant with the latest movements in art, and Carrie likewise, the ubiquitous ‘Mrs James of Sutton’ almost certainly is. It is she who is responsible for Carrie’s flirtations with Aesthetic touches such as writing on dark slate-coloured paper with white ink and draping the mantelpiece with toy spiders, frogs and beetles, an obviously impractical art-for-art’s-sake deed which baffles Pooter who ‘preferred the mantelpiece as it was’.
Throughout its trenchant satire and rich comedy The Diary of a Nobody also manages to paint a memorable portrait of the Victorian class system. Pooter
