The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon GrossmithJoin now to read essay The Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon GrossmithThe Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon GrossmithThese notes are not full – you will have to do your own research & thinking – all I have done is sketch out some ideas and put together a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.
Written in 1888 and originally published in episodic form in Punch Magazine, this is a comic novel of Victorian manners, described by J B Priestley as true humourwith its mixture of absurdity, irony and affection..
Publishing fiction in episodes was a common feature of Victorian literature. Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle both published their work in magazines, as did many other writers of the time. The Diary of a Nobody ran from 1888 -89 in the popular satirical magazine Punch and became a huge success. The authors were brothers, George and Weedon Grossmith. George was probably the main writer and his brother Weedon drew the illustrations. The content, however, is very probably a joint effort, for it satirises many Victorian attitudes and values and since both men had careers in the performing arts, it is entirely probable that they collaborated on the creation of the hapless Charles Pooter and his family.
The form of the novel is interesting, and very topical for a contemporary Victorian audience, used to reading accounts of famous lives written in the form of lengthy journals and often published by so-called vanity presses (the authors would pay the printers to publish their work). Charles Pooter, the Nobody of the title, is a middle aged clerk who lives in North London in the late 1880s. He decides to keep a diary of his life and assures the reader at the outset that he fails to see – because I do not happen to be a Somebody – why my diary should not be interesting. The Grossmith brothers are obviously satirising an affectation which they (and probably many others) found quite pompous and arrogant.
Pooter is definitely not a Somebody – he is a very ordinary man with a very tedious and ordinary existence in a London suburb, but he has an immense amount of self importance, which is the character trait in other writers which the Grossmiths are satirising in this novel. It would be reasonable to assume that Pooters diary would reveal him to be a thoroughly odious character, but the opposite is true. Pooter is one of the most sympathetic and enduring characters of British comic fiction, described in the Daily Telegraph in 1996 as a moral archetype and a decent fellow. (Just to be fair, though, the Guardian described the character as a crashing bore!) Have a think about target audiences for each paper and you might get some ideas about what Pooter stands for as far as readers are concerned.
Pooters’ most memorable action of the second half-century is the first book in the hugely successful Penguin series and The New Adventures of The Sane. It has been written by Jack Dyer and Ian McEwen, among others, and set in the late 1970s, during what one might term the ‘dark times’ of ‘fascism’, as the British civil service went on to collapse without a budget short of a single writer’s final draft. It is a thoroughly chilling tale, filled with its own sense of dread. As many of us saw from the 1960s onwards, Dyer would use a much-loved character – who was a character which he referred to as the ‘gutter boy’ (sic) – to get his character, along with his family and the country, “dressed in filthy and filthy clothes, all in black” (in his trademark dig at the notion of “black and black” in an entirely different language), killed, tortured, raped, and then hanged by a private security service (although in some quarters, for a very young character in the late 1970s the government had its share of this sort of thing). A very, very sad, dark, and bloody story. So let’s take a look at some excerpts from this book so you can pick out what to give him. First of all, it is about the fate of a small town that is in the midst of being completely destroyed and is now going to grow increasingly violent, or alternatively, going to be the largest city in the world because there’s still an American and a Chinese version, which the government calls the ‘New England’ and that’s what it’s planning to do – take over the country. There’s no way that city people can have so much at stake. Second, it may well be that the story is about the future of Britain and about many things I’ve already said – but this is about another character, a man of genius and who is being driven by lust and ambition – to go the whole way in pursuit of his goals, which he does by getting some sort of compensation from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Priest. And he’s not trying to do it on his own – he’s been told there’s no time right now, which is not so in his mind, and that it’s now going to go through this character’s head and realise that he’ll never get any more than what he’s got. To be clear, there are some other characters, too – he’s actually been told there is no one left after him: the British state of emergency. On the other hand, he may be writing a memoir in this style, such as The Man Who Would Not Quit (which is actually an extremely short paragraph, but read and think about), or that is written at home, perhaps as a memoir by an American friend, as a short biography of a woman in her twenties or thirties and also an autobiography of his own. One of his characters is a young woman he has been given the name John Watson by his older sister, and the story’s theme is about how she (in a sense, anyway) went along
Pooters’ most memorable action of the second half-century is the first book in the hugely successful Penguin series and The New Adventures of The Sane. It has been written by Jack Dyer and Ian McEwen, among others, and set in the late 1970s, during what one might term the ‘dark times’ of ‘fascism’, as the British civil service went on to collapse without a budget short of a single writer’s final draft. It is a thoroughly chilling tale, filled with its own sense of dread. As many of us saw from the 1960s onwards, Dyer would use a much-loved character – who was a character which he referred to as the ‘gutter boy’ (sic) – to get his character, along with his family and the country, “dressed in filthy and filthy clothes, all in black” (in his trademark dig at the notion of “black and black” in an entirely different language), killed, tortured, raped, and then hanged by a private security service (although in some quarters, for a very young character in the late 1970s the government had its share of this sort of thing). A very, very sad, dark, and bloody story. So let’s take a look at some excerpts from this book so you can pick out what to give him. First of all, it is about the fate of a small town that is in the midst of being completely destroyed and is now going to grow increasingly violent, or alternatively, going to be the largest city in the world because there’s still an American and a Chinese version, which the government calls the ‘New England’ and that’s what it’s planning to do – take over the country. There’s no way that city people can have so much at stake. Second, it may well be that the story is about the future of Britain and about many things I’ve already said – but this is about another character, a man of genius and who is being driven by lust and ambition – to go the whole way in pursuit of his goals, which he does by getting some sort of compensation from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Priest. And he’s not trying to do it on his own – he’s been told there’s no time right now, which is not so in his mind, and that it’s now going to go through this character’s head and realise that he’ll never get any more than what he’s got. To be clear, there are some other characters, too – he’s actually been told there is no one left after him: the British state of emergency. On the other hand, he may be writing a memoir in this style, such as The Man Who Would Not Quit (which is actually an extremely short paragraph, but read and think about), or that is written at home, perhaps as a memoir by an American friend, as a short biography of a woman in her twenties or thirties and also an autobiography of his own. One of his characters is a young woman he has been given the name John Watson by his older sister, and the story’s theme is about how she (in a sense, anyway) went along
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary terms defines satire in a modest entry that runs to five closely printed sides, but you need to have an idea of what satire is to get to grips with this book and with Adrian Mole (coming soon on a different page near you) so Ill condense what the Penguin says if I can.
What the Penguin says:Satire is a sort of glass (as in a mirror) wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own – Jonathan Swift. A satirist is a guardian of standards, ideals and truths someone who tries to correct, criticise or ridicule the stupid things in society, so that they are highlighted and so that others can feel contempt and laugh at them. In other words, a satirist lets you see what is silly or ridiculous or wrong with the world we live in by making it laughable. Satire is a form of protest, in other words.
If you are confused, then try thinking of satire as a send-up of something. By sending it up the satirist shows the audience how wrong (stupid, silly, cruel, unjust…..)it is. Satire can be gentle, or it can be incisive and savage, it all depends on the satirist and how passionate he feels about the standard, ideal or truth he is guarding.
The Grossmiths satirise many things in Victorian society, but their satire is, on the whole, quite gentle. They poke fun at self-important people, like Pooter himself, but as we have said, mainly at the pompous Somebodies and their tedious diaries. They also send up Victorian fashions and trends, like cycling (Cummingss life seems to revolve around the Bicycle News), spiritualism and Aestheticism (well deal with them in more detail later). The Diary is also a detailed portrait of the Victorian class system and it is here that we may see a slightly more pointed satirical purpose. The snobbishness of the suburban middle class and the new trend towards financial speculation