The Diary of a Nobody

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 Freres’.

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

1

Article in the Daily Mail (28 June 1930).

2

J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 94.

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.

4

Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 372.

5

Tony Joseph, George Grossmith, Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol: Tony Joseph, 1982), p. 42.

6

The turning-point in our attitude towards Pooter comes on 21 March when Lupin, still smarting from losing his fiancee to a rival suitor, Murray Posh, from the hat-making family of the same name, lets out his frustration on a Posh hat he owns. At first Pooter is shocked by Lupin’s violent behaviour, but when he picks up the hat and finds the motif ‘Posh’s Patent’ he sympathizes with the boy’s plight. That this rare display of compassion comes three- quarters of the way through the book seems odd until one realizes that this scene was part of the original ending of the Diary when it first came out in Punch.

7

Sunday Times (23 February 1997).

8

The Oxford English Dictionary lists under ‘Pooterish’: ‘So many square miles of vapid and banal and Pooterish suburbs’ (taken from the Times Literary Supplement, 31 December 1976), and refers to George VI’s deadpan account of Pooterish bishops blundering through his coronation (taken from The Times, 14 May 1977).

9

In recent years articles in broadsheet newspapers have regularly compared public figures to the hero of The Diary of a Nobody. For instance, the Guardian in 1995 described footballer Alan Shearer’s Diary of a Season as like ‘Pooter without the laughs’. Two years later Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, was described in a Sunday