Nobody Home

Someone of the other sort

The Diary of a Nobody by George and Wheedon Grossmith

Justifiably a classic, what makes this book have the effect it has had for over a hundred and twenty years? Is it the glimpse into the lower-middle class life as carved out and paid for by Charles Pooter and his wife Carrie? Their doomed bids for status, for gentility — their vain, so vain, pretence that they matter and that other people hold them in respect, nay, awe?

Is it the slapstick? Mr Pooter painting his bath such a fetching shade of red, before climbing into it and realising that the paint has run in the hot water, and getting out of the tub to find himself dyed crimson — with little hope of being clean any time soon. Is this where the humour lies? And not just humour. Why is it read at all?

Is it because, a century and a quarter on, the whole thing is strangely moving? The idea that these little lives, recognised as real by contemporary readers, must now by cruel mathematics all have been snuffed out — their status games long forgotten, their fears and their anxieties meaningless now, their triumphs and disasters all gone. Even their modest London homes (the Pooters lived in ‘The Laurels’, Holloway) now turned into HMOs filled with sad single professionals in their late thirties, or otherwise (if kept whole and as they were) being worth millions and in the hands of some very lucky people with inherited money or who happened to be born at the right time. One wonders if it is that.

But what this book is, most of all, is funny. Pooter is so absurd, so like adenoidal, status-conscious weirdos we have all met. He feels terrible pride in his own small accomplishments, a dreadful jealous need to guard what little status he has — a desperate desire for his colleagues at the city firm Perkupp's to think him important, in good standing. Always bidding to keep up with his contemporaries — the Jameses, not quite the Joneses, but close — and with nearer neighbours Gower and Cummings, too. Desperately eager is Pooter, too, that his wife not embarrass him with her slight reserve of common and uncouth ways. Although, as at the Lord Mayor’s banquet (for the fine ‘Representatives of Trade and Commerce’) — which, to the Pooters’ dismay, is for ordinary people (the Pooters do not consider themselves ordinary) — it is often Pooter whose antics thoroughly embarrass his wife.

There are some jokes that are truly timeless. The waster son, William, twenty years old, who has gone off to Oldham to work as a bank clerk, but was instead sacked for his idleness, who has now returned to live with Mum and Dad and wishes to be an actor and to be known by a new name, Lupin. And Lupin joins a theatrical troupe (the ‘Holloway Comedians’), and they are, in Mr Pooter’s telling, all louts and useless, but the boy appears to care rather more about the stage than that clerk’s job in Oldham.

And then Lupin is in love and determined to be engaged and his father thinks all of this carry-on is just a little humiliating and contrary not to his morals, per se, but to his status in society, which matters very much to him; and he must find Lupin a job and he might as well see the boy into working for one of the really good firms, not the poorer ones without class; and he may as well ensure that the boy has a real firm footing on the ladder. Yet the boy continues to want, against all good sense, against all fatherly advice, to desire to go his own way. He does not care so much as his father about his work!

And trips to Broadstairs and talk of stock-market speculation and so many inconsequential little conversations over dinner, and the new hobby of bicycling, taken up by Cummings, and the little things people filled their days with. All of it in Mr Pooter’s remarkable narrative voice: so self-satisfied, so filled with bathos, so unaware of how he comes across, so completely unaware. The life of so pompous a man is always funny. Always funny to everyone except to him.