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 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.
13
Keith Waterhouse,
14
This led J. B. Priestley to describe Padge as ‘the most laconic character in English Literature’ in
15
George Grossmith published his own recollections,
16