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 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 grâce – ‘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 naïvety 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 naïve 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 à la Wilde and a wig with one single white lock à 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 risqué 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 is a terrific snob, even though he has little to be snobbish about. As far as we know he has attended no great school, has little cultural awareness (he never visits an art gallery, reads anything other than the Daily Telegraph, or takes any interest in learning) and is only a lowly clerk when we first meet him. Yet he continually shows contempt for those supposedly lower down the social scale and, determined to keep his distance from such people, is mortified when Farmerson, the ironmonger, turns up at the Mansion House Ball (7 May, year 1). ‘I simply looked at him, and said coolly: “I never expected to see you here.” ’ Farmerson then has the gall to know one of the sheriffs. ‘To think that a man who mends our scraper should know any member of our aristocracy!’ In one stroke Pooter displays admirable ignorance: sheriffs are appointed and no more aristocratic than clerks. And in any case, how could a ‘member of the aristocracy’ have gone to school with Farmerson?
Most of all Pooter’s position is defined by his address. If he were Perkupp he might live in sumptuous surroundings such as Kensington or Chelsea. Instead, as one of Perkupp’s underlings, he is obliged to inhabit that most hellish of English locations, suburbia. Pooter’s suburban hell is Holloway with which the Grossmiths were well acquainted, having been raised in Hampstead, two miles west, and having attended the North London Collegiate School in neighbouring Camden Town. Holloway was just one of scores of erstwhile London villages which grew rapidly following industrialization from being an insignificant Middlesex hamlet, separated from London proper by a few miles of farms and fields, to being part of the new London sprawl covered with rows of houses, roads, schools, shops and warehouses. The capital’s population rose accordingly. As David Thorns showed in Suburbia,20 ‘During the second half of the 19th century the population of London’s outer ring grew by approximately fifty per cent in each of the ten-year periods between the census of 1861 and that of 1891.’
A crucial factor in Holloway’s growth was the arrival of the railways, by which Pooter lives, as set out very early in the book. David Thorns in Suburbia claimed that ‘the growth of the suburbs… was almost entirely the product of the improved system of public transport’,21 not that improved transport was necessarily beneficial to the area, for as the London Encyclopaedia puts it, ‘the expansion of the railways, the spread of industry and grim housing with no space for parks made Holloway a synonym for a drab existence’.22
Holloway, mostly residential with only a smattering of light industry such as timber yards and goods depots, was aimed specifically at the white-collar brigade of clerks whose number mushroomed as the financial sector needed to keep the heart of the empire beating grew. By the beginning of the 1890s there were 100,000 clerks in the City.23 Holloway, though salaried and middle class, had little conspicuous wealth and few facilities. The houses were tightly packed with just enough room for a garden, but care was taken on the design of some of the properties, especially those to the north, near the hills of Highgate, and especially where clerks like Pooter could feel reassured by one or two architectural flourishes. So while Pooter’s home, ‘The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace’, as drawn by Weedon Grossmith, may be a basic square box, the dash of baroque features add the kind of integrity that would gladden Pooter’s heart. There are heavy stone facings on the windows, a cornice with parapet and a half-basement. There is a stuccoed base and a flight of steps up to the porticoed front door (which is never used anyway). The main living area is slightly raised above the street level in the Italian piano nobile style so that Pooter can feel elevated from the common herd.
But where did the Grossmiths set the Laurels? There are countless examples of such houses throughout north London but there is no evidence that the Grossmiths based Pooter’s house on a real address, and there now remains only one such house in Holloway that backs on to the railway – 1 Pemberton Gardens – close to Upper Holloway Station. When Richard West, researching for the Independent an article commemorating the centenary of the book version of The Diary of a Nobody, found this house in 1992, like so many houses of its size and style in north London it had been divided into flats.
Houses designed like the Laurels, ridiculed at the time, are now considered desirable by most home-owners. The locale less so. The suburbs have always been ridiculed as a place of inferior status to the city or countryside. Ben Jonson in Every Man in His Humour (1598) cracked the line: ‘If I can but hold him up to his height… it will do well for a suburbe-humour.’ By Victorian times the rapid growth of new suburbs like Holloway led to fresh attacks. An anonymous contributor to The Architect in 1876 wrote: ‘A modern suburb is a place which is neither one thing nor the other; it has neither the advantage of the town nor the open freedom of the country, but manages to combine in nice equality of proportion the disadvantages of both.’24 Holloway earned a rare literary mention in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, 1865. Reginald Wilfer, a clerk in the drug-house of Chicksey, Veneering and Stobbles (a post that would have suited Pooter) lives in Holloway, ‘a tract of suburban Sahara where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by the contractors’.25 Later, Walter Besant in London in the 19th Century, commented on ‘the life of the suburb without any society; no social gatherings or institutions; as dull a life as mankind ever tolerated’.26
In the twentieth century writers have continued the barbs. To E. M. Forster suburbia was ‘a land where nothing had to be striven for and success was indistinguishable from failure’. George Orwell railed against suburbia’s ‘semi-detached torture chambers’ and more recently one character in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes moans: ‘I come from suburbia… and I don’t ever want to go back. It’s the one place in the world that’s further away than anywhere else.’
Few writers other than John Betjeman have had a good word to say about this huge slice of England. Betjeman continually gave support to suburbia, and in two poems, ‘Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody’ and ‘Middlesex’ referred to Diary of a Nobody characters. ‘Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody’ is a paean to the vanishing semi-rural county, nostalgically recalling that when ‘the Pooters walked to Watney Lodge’ the public footpaths ‘used to dodge round elms and oaks to Muswell Hill’, although even here the inclusion of the ‘chuffs of the Great Northern train’ reminds readers of the identity of the culprit responsible for the local changes. In ‘Middlesex’ Betjeman reminiscences about ‘taverns for the bona fide, Cockney Anglers, cockney shooters, Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters’.
But Lupin probably wouldn’t be impressed. To him Holloway, and Brickfield Terrace in particular, is a ‘bit off’. Once he has some money he moves to posh Bayswater just beyond the West End, whereas Pooter celebrates being able to live in Holloway for the rest of his life after Perkupp buys the Laurels’ freehold and presents it to him. Yet it is most likely Lupin who makes the wiser decision
; Pooter should have been forewarned by the arrival of the loutish Griffin boys next door. A decade after the Diary was written the outwardly respectable Dr Crippen poisoned his wife in a house on Hilldrop Crescent only a half a mile south. Weedon Grossmith, for one, was well aware of the changes in Holloway in his lifetime. He wrote in his autobiography, From Studio to Stage,27 in 1913 about fishing in the New River less than a mile east of Pooterland at ‘a place with bean fields all around, but all built over 25 years ago’ [i.e, around the time the Diary first appeared in Punch].
In the twentieth century Holloway continued to be developed, so that now almost no parkland or greenery, let alone a bean field, remains, and even the New River has been culverted as it passes near Holloway. The area is also no longer classed as suburban, but inner-city. Of course suburbia is continually on the move, as cities develop. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote: ‘In the south suburbs, at the Elephant it is best to lodge.’ The Elephant (Elephant & Castle) would not have been classed as suburban even by the time The Diary of a Nobody was written. Early in the twentieth century Pooterland moved to what are now termed the ‘leafy suburbs’ – Hillingdon, Hatch End or Havering-atte-Bower – places which make Pooter’s Holloway look like havens of intellectual debate in comparison.28 Pooter’s suburban idyll has given way to a land of congested trunk roads, run-down housing and urban blight, brought about largely by the presence of the Holloway Road (better known as the A1), a traditional exit route from London but which became one of the busiest roads in London.
By the time of Joe Orton’s mid-1960s journal, significantly entitled Diary of a Somebody, Holloway, in one of its few literary mentions, is merely the setting for the dark public toilets where Orton indulges in homosexual encounters. Shortly before Orton wrote his diary, in 1959, Punch published some joke predictions. The most ridiculous was thought to be the one that suggested that the middle classes would move to Islington, the borough which includes Holloway. Punch was slightly wrong. Following the arrival of the fast Victoria Line tube in the late 1960s the middle classes did recolonize Islington but they went for nearby Barnsbury, Canonbury or Highbury Hill, not Holloway, which remains ungentrified. So Lupin Pooter is probably right; Holloway is still ‘a bit off’.