(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.
(December 18) ‘I am sure it would prove quite as interesting as some of the ridiculous reminiscences that have been published lately’: A nice dig at the main author; only a few months previously George Grossmith’s own memoirs, A Society Clown, had appeared.
(December 21) I left the room with silent dignity but caught my foot in the mat: This was based on an incident from Weedon’s youth when his father spotted that he’d been drinking and Weedon, trying to slink out of the room to go to bed, caught his foot in the rug and fell on the floor.
(February 20) ‘Great Failure of Stock and Share Dealers!’: In a well-known news story of the day a Kimberley diamond magnate, Barney Barnato, gambled away a fortune in other people’s money and then threw himself into the sea from a boat moored off the African coast.
(March 21) Today I shall conclude my diary: This entry, with Charles Pooter’s greatest ambition fulfilled, namely to have Lupin work alongside him at Perkupp’s firm, was originally the last of the Punch instalments. Now it just looks like a false ending.
(April 16) the cabman, who was a rough bully: George Grossmith wrote a song, ‘He was a Careful Man’, which included the lines ‘He knew how cabmen will impose if people don’t take care/By charging for a mile or two beyond the proper fare.’
(April 16) as I intend writing to the Telegraph: To this day some people, including the Daily Telegraph, haven’t got the joke. The authors are mocking the kind of self- important person, the precursor of the modern-day ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’, who writes to that newspaper over some trifling injustice. The Telegraph claimed this incident as a PR coup in a 1996 editorial in which they declared their honour at being ‘associated with such a decent fellow’.
(May 30) I found Carrie buried in a book on Spiritualism, called There is no Birth, by Florence Singleyet: Spiritualism, very popular during Victorian times – even Queen Victoria partook – was introduced to Britain in 1852 from the United States. As J. B. Priestley explained in Victoria’s Heyday: ‘In every town there were darkened rooms in which luminous spirit faces appeared, musical instruments played themselves, strange voices were heard prophesying… spiritualism and its miracles were all the rage’ (J. B. Priestley, Victoria’s Heyday, London: Heinemann, 1972).
