NOVEMBER 19,  Sunday. I don’t pretend to be able to express myself in fine language, but I feel I have the power of expressing my thoughts with simplicity and lucidness.
(from the diary of Charles Pooter)

It helps if you know that the diary’s authors, George and Weedon Grossmith, were both entertainers. George, or ‘Gee Gee’ as he liked to be known, was born in 1847, began his career as a singer and entertainer in 1870 and went on to work closely with Gilbert and Sullivan, being the first performer and ‘creator’ of many of their chief parts at the Savoy Theatre, from 1877 onwards. Gee Gee became a prolific writer of comic sketches and songs. Leaving the Savoy in 1889, he toured Britain and America as an entertainer and singer till 1901 and his autobiography was titled Reminiscences of a Clown.

Weedon Grossmith was George’s younger brother, born in 1854. At first he trained as an artist at the Slade, and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Academy. But art didn’t work out and he, too, succumbed to the lure of the theatre, joining a drama company in 1885 and touring the provinces and America. Weedon wrote a novel and a series of plays, and managed Terry’s theatre in London for over a decade, appearing in numerous roles, until 1917.

The point being, then, that the brothers were extremely well practiced in writing and performing comedy when they were approached by the editor of Punch magazine in 1888 to write a satirical skit about the humdrum life of a pompous, lower-middle-class ‘nobody’.

The whole thing was intended as a satire on the recent flurry of eminent ‘somebodies’ in the worlds of politics and the arts publishing autobiographies and diaries – why not the diary of someone of absolutely no significance whatsoever?

And thus was born the character of Charles Pooter, well-meaning but rather stuffy, priggish, married father of one, clerk in a stuffy, old-fashioned firm in the City, who tries to lead a dignified and respectable life but who fate is constantly twitting and undermining – in the form of a temperamental servant, a layabout son, numerous uppity tradesmen, unreliable friends and the sniggering mockery of the younger clerks at his work.

The first episode of the fictional diary was published in Punch magazine in May 1888 and it then ran for 26 fortnightly instalments until May 1889. At that point the text didn’t have illustrations and the story ended with an entry for 21 May, when Charles’s disrespectful, good-for-nothing son, Lupin, finally secures a job at Charles’s own firm, Perkupps.

However, when the text was prepared for publication in book form in 1892, the authors added a further four months’ entries to the text, and 26 illustrations by Weedon Grossmith. These are amiable pen and ink sketches typical for the time, none of them masterpieces, but they have a significant impact on the text, vividly bringing the characters to life and introducing a form of visual punctuation which makes you dwell a fraction longer on scenes and moments, letting them sink in.

APRIL 30 — I seized her round the waist, and we were silly enough to be executing a wild kind of polka when Sarah entered, grinning, and said: “There is a man, mum, at the door who wants to know if you want any good coals.”

Plot overview

Charles Pooter is a clerk in Perkupps, a firm in the City of London. He is happily married to Caroline or ‘Carrie’, as he affectionately calls her. He has two male friends, Gowing and Cummings, who pop round to see him most evenings, for a chats or a game of dominoes. The diary opens on 3 April, a week after Charles and Carries have moved into a new house:

‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway—a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door, which, by-the-by, we keep locked with the chain up. Cummings, Gowing, and our other intimate friends always come to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking her from her work. We have a nice little back garden which runs down to the railway. We were rather afraid of the noise of the trains at first, but the landlord said we should not notice them after a bit, and took £2 off the rent. He was certainly right; and beyond the cracking of the garden wall at the bottom, we have suffered no inconvenience.

This opening paragraph sets the tone. Unlike much Victorian writing, it is concise. With precision it not only describes the kind of suburban house in question, but immediately conveys the tone of fussing over details and concern over money which are such a large part of Charles Pooter’s existence.

The opening also conveys the Pooters’ social situation to a t. Having a house and a servant doubtless makes Charles and Carrie just about lower-middle class, but the detail of the railway roaring along the bottom of the garden every few minutes, so fiercely that it has cracked the garden wall, conveys just how precarious their achievement is. And the fussing and fretting about Sarah the servant which runs through the entire book shows the Pooters completely lack the money or savoir faire of the true middle classes.

Theirs is a world of continual small failures and petty humiliations which they are always trying to look on the bright side of. Charles is continually ripping his trousers or wearing ones which are too short or the wrong kinds of boots. The junior clerks at his work take the mickey out of him and throw scrunched-up paper balls at him or mutter nicknames as he walks past, such as ‘Hornpipe’ when he happens to be wearing trousers tight at the knee though loose over the boots, like a sailor.

Charles is thrilled when he is invited to the Mayor’s annual ball then deflated when he realises everyone else in his office has been invited, too, and further demoralised when he finds that the rude and incompetent ironmonger he’s paid to remove the scraper from outside the front door of The Laurels, is also there and boozily treats Charles – to his chagrin – as a social equal.

Charles is a well-meaning man entirely trapped in the prison of his own personality. He gives us quite a few examples of ripping jokes he makes which no-one else gets or thinks are as funny as he does. He reports his best friends, Gowing and Cummings, as casually putting him down about his sense of humour. In a hundred and one ways the diary cleverly reveals the discrepancy between how we see ourselves, how we experience our own lives and thoughts and ideas – and how other people perceive us, which, we can be confident, is with a lot less sympathy and understanding than we perceive ourselves. In fact, most of the time, it is with complete indifference occasionally interspersed with casual mockery.

Thus although all the book’s many incidents are funny to read about, it’s hard to avoid the underlying sadness of the thing. The comedy is mixed with poignancy at Charles’s entrapment within his own narrow life, values and hopes. The thoughtful reader might reflect that this is true of all of us; we think our hard work is acknowledged, we have a fine reputation, our friends talk about us with respect, and our jokes set the table on a roar. But what if none of these things are true? What if we have a reputation at work for being slow and getting things wrong; if our friends laugh at us behind our back; if our sense of humour is notorious for being laboured and obvious?

Charles thinks he is standing on his dignity when his name is omitted from the comprehensive list of all the guests who attended the Mansion House Ball which is given in the Blackfriars Bi-weekly News. But when he writes to complain, he is mortified to have his name included but mispelt in the addendum, as Mrs and Mrs Porter. When he writes for a third time, the journalists begin to take the mickey of this self-important little man.

May 16.—Absolutely disgusted on opening the Blackfriars Bi-weekly News of to-day, to find the following paragraph: ‘We have received two letters from Mr. and Mrs. Charles Pewter, requesting us to announce the important fact that they were at the Mansion House Ball.’ I tore up the paper and threw it in the waste-paper basket. My time is far too valuable to bother about such trifles.

It is not only his mortification, but his immediate justification to himself that he is ‘above’ such trifles, when it is he himself who has insisted on the importance of such trifles. The text constantly hovers on this borderline, laughing with Charles, then at him, then with him again.

May 25.—Carrie brought down some of my shirts and advised me to take them to Trillip’s round the corner. She said: ‘The fronts and cuffs are much frayed.’ I said without a moment’s hesitation: ‘I’m ’frayed they are.’ Lor! how we roared. I thought we should never stop laughing. As I happened to be sitting next the driver going to town on the ’bus, I told him my joke about the ‘frayed’ shirts. I thought he would have rolled off his seat. They laughed at the office a good bit too over it.

May 26.—Left the shirts to be repaired at Trillip’s. I said to him: ‘I’m ’fraid they are frayed.’ He said, without a smile: ‘They’re bound to do that, sir.’ Some people seem to be quite destitute of a sense of humour.

It’s a little like the comedy of the TV series The Office. The protagonist is painfully assured of his own point of view, his own wisdom, wit and good sense; while almost everything he says and does, and the responses of pretty much everyone else in the narrative, undermine this perspective. The humour is mixed with sympathy and poignancy and something occasionally like pity.

Charles is the butt of jokes between even his supposed ‘best friends’ Cummings and Gowing, none of the tradesmen he deals with take him seriously or show him any respect, the junior clerks at his workplace mutter nicknames as he walks past, his attempts at dignity are continually being undercut.

Charles and Carrie’s annual holiday goes predictably wrong when the landlady of the boarding house in Broadstairs which they always go to, initially confirms their places but then at the last minute announces she is fully booked. It is funny but also sad when he reveals that the rooms they eventually have to take with another landlady are near the station, which is fine, just fine, perfectly fine, because rooms on the cliffs would have been so much more expensive, anyway. Charles is continually justifying and looking on the bright side of the penny-pinching, scraping by, making do and mend that his limited income forces him to.

August 13.—Hurrah! at Broadstairs. Very nice apartments near the station. On the cliffs they would have been double the price. The landlady had a nice five o’clock dinner and tea ready, which we all enjoyed, though Lupin seemed fastidious because there happened to be a fly in the butter. It was very wet in the evening, for which I was thankful, as it was a good excuse for going to bed early.

The cheap rooms, the fly in the butter, the heavy rain on his holiday: he tries to rise above all the petty vexations of his little life. In fact it rains throughout their holiday week but Charles is determined to look on the bright side, despite his own son refusing to be seen with him wearing the ridiculous new straw hat he had made specially for the holiday.

‘August 16.—Lupin positively refused to walk down the Parade with me because I was wearing my new straw helmet with my frock-coat. I don’t know what the boy is coming to.’

His greatest humiliation is when he attends the Lord Mayor’s ball and tries to please Carrie by whisking her out onto the dancefloor but, because he is wearing new shoes, slips on the polished floor and falls heavily, banging his head nastily, pulling Carrie down with him, in front of everyone. Hard to live that one down.

But there are plenty of other humiliations, large and small. After church one Sunday he is flattered to be approached by ‘Mrs. Fernlosse, who is quite a grand lady, living in one of those large houses in the Camden Road’ and she is just about to start talking to him when a gust of wind blows his hat off and into the middle of the road, where he has to scamper about like an idiot to retrieve it only to turn and discover…. Mrs Fernlosse has moved on to chat to some of her swell friends.

It was a very shrewd move to introduce Charles and Carrie’s son in chapter 6 while Charles and his tribulations were still fresh i.e. before we’d got bored with his little escapades. The pacing bespeaks two authors who between them had written countless sketches and stage shows. Before Charles and Carrie’s little world has a chance to flag, the arrival of Pooter Junior introduces a whole new realm of comic possibilities for he is a son who blithely ignores all Charles’s advice, orders and attempts to stand on his dignity, as casually as his friends and tradesmen have been shown to.

The son has been christened William but much prefers his larky middle name, Lupin. He is 20 years old and had been working at a bank in Oldham but ‘got the chuck’ and has come back to live with his parents. Right from the start he demonstrates a breezy indifference to Charles’s well-meaning but stuffy rules and advice, stays out late with his mates, gets drunk, only gets up after lunch, is reluctant to get another job. Charles conscientiously writes a succession of letters to prospective employers and the steady stream of rejections becomes a comic leitmotiv of the second quarter of the book.

Things move on apace when Chapter 8 introduces us to the fact that Lupin has fallen in love and proposed to a young woman named Daisy Mutlar. Inevitably, when they finally meet the young lady, both Charles and Carrie think she is not quite right for Lupin:

We asked them in for a few minutes, and I had a good look at my future daughter-in-law. My heart quite sank. She is a big young woman, and I should think at least eight years older than Lupin. I did not even think her good-looking.

But, just as inevitably, Charles tries to put a brave face on it.

NOVEMBER 3. Lupin said: ‘I’m engaged to be married!’

From my description you might have thought Charles and Carrie’s lives would be dull and boring but in fact they have a surprising number of parties and get-togethers, albeit in a rather straitened, Victorian way.

Because Charles is always standing on his dignity, these ‘do’s’ involve no end of complications, resentments and bad feeling. Like when Lupin brings home his friend from the local amateur dramatic society he has joined, the Holloway Comedians, one Mr Burwin-Fosselton, who does a storming impersonation of the famous late Victorian actor, Mr Henry Irving. The evening is somewhat spoiled by the fact that Charles’s friend Gowing invites along a fat man named Padge, who insists on sitting in the best armchair all evening, and smoking a gross pipe.

‘NOVEMBER 23. The man Padge, who had got the best arm-chair, and was puffing away at a foul pipe into the fireplace.’

Or the extravagant engagement party Charles and Carrie hold for Lupin and Daisy where the guests scoff all the food and swill all the champagne so that when Charles’s boss arrives, coming late in the evening from another engagement, Charles is mortified not to be able to offer him anything, not even any soda water.

Charles is very clumsy. Take, for example, the time he visits Smirksons’, the drapers, in the Strand, who had created impressive displays of Christmas cards. He takes it upon himself to tell one of the shop assistants how careless the other customers were, when:

DECEMBER 20. The observation was scarcely out of my mouth, when my thick coat-sleeve caught against a large pile of expensive cards in boxes one on top of the other, and threw them down. The manager came forward, looking very much annoyed, and picking up several cards from the ground, said to one of the assistants, with a palpable side-glance at me: ‘Put these amongst the sixpenny goods; they can’t be sold for a shilling now.’ The result was, I felt it my duty to buy some of these damaged cards.

Or:

FEBRUARY 18. I was this morning trying to look at [my hair] by the aid of a small hand-glass, when somehow my elbow caught against the edge of the chest of drawers and knocked the glass out of my hand and smashed it. Carrie was in an awful way about it, as she is rather absurdly superstitious.

Or:

JULY 3, Sunday. In the afternoon, as I was looking out of the parlour window, which was open, a grand trap, driven by a lady, with a gentleman seated by the side of her, stopped at our door. Not wishing to be seen, I withdrew my head very quickly, knocking the back of it violently against the sharp edge of the window-sash. I was nearly stunned.

Clumsiness is connected to bathos, which is itself a kind of textual falling over, a stumble from the dignified to the comically clumsy. (Bathos is defined as a literary ‘effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.’) Take the moment when (December 21) Charles tells Lupin not to take Daisy breaking up with him to heart, at which Lupin loses his temper with his interfering father:

He jumped up and said: ‘I won’t allow one word to be uttered against her. She’s worth the whole bunch of your friends put together, that inflated, sloping-head of a Perkupp included.’ I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.

Or (March 21) after his boss, Mr Perkupp, has movingly paid tribute to Charles’s loyal, dogged character, on the bus home Charles feels like crying:

It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from crying in the ’bus; in fact, I should have done so, had my thoughts not been interrupted by Lupin, who was having a quarrel with a fat man in the ’bus, whom he accused of taking up too much room.

It is emblematic of the way Charles’s continual quest to have finer, more dignified feelings is continually undermined by the insensitive boorishness of the cut-price world around him.

Characters

Diary of a Nobody is generally taken as mocking the narrow, boring world of suburbia, which on one level it obviously is. But this doesn’t mean the narrative is restricted to a small number of people; quite the opposite. When you stop and count them there are far more characters in the book than you think:

• Charles Pooter
• Caroline ‘Carrie’ Pooter
• William ‘Lupin’ Pooter
• Sarah the servant
• Mrs. Birrell the charwoman
• Gowing, friend
• Cummings, friend
• Farmerson, the ironmonger
• Horwin ‘a civil butcher with a nice clean shop’
• Borset the butterman
• the grocer’s boy
• Mr. Putley, a painter and decorator
• woman hired to make some chintz covers for our drawing-room chairs and sofa
• ‘the little tailor’s round the corner’, presumably the same as Trillip’s round the corner which Carrie recommends to repair Charles’s shirts
• Lockwood’s, a local store which sells ‘the Unsweetened’, some kind of spirit
• the curate of the local church
• Perkupp, Charles’s boss
• Buckling, one of the senior clerks at Perkupp’s
• Pitt, an impertinent junior clerk at Perkupp’s, aged just 17
• Shoemach, friend of Gowing
• Stillbrook, friend of Gowing and Cummings, accompanies them on the ill-fated walk to Hampstead, when Charles is refused admission to a pub which the others swan into
• Merton, friend of Cummings, who is in the wine trade and promises to get him free tickets to the theatre which turn out to be anything but
• Mr and Mrs James from Sutton, the wife being an old schoolfriend of Carrie’s
• Mr. Willowly, manager of the Tank Theatre, Islington
• Brickwell, friend of Charles’s who recommends the new Pinkford’s enamel paint
• the Lord and Lady Mayoress
• Franching, from Peckham, who Charles thinks he sees at the ball, then later invites round for tea, ‘a great swell in his way’
• one of the sheriffs, in full Court costume
• Darwitts, the gentleman who helps Carrie to a chair after she slips over at the Mayor’s ball
• Brownish, the chemist
• Miss Jibbons, makes Carrie’s dresses
• Mrs. Beck, landlady of holiday apartments at Harbour View Terrace, Broadstairs
• Edwards’s, men’s tailors
• Mr. Higgsworth, friend who owns a telescope, ‘which he always lends me, knowing I know how to take care of it’
• Mrs. Womming, another landlady in Broadstairs, who offers them rooms after Mrs Beck lets them down
• the caddish new next door neighbours who throw a brick in his bed of geraniums
• Mrs. Burtsett, an old friend of Carrie’s cousins, the Pommertons, late of Dalston
• Daisy Mutlar, Lupin’s beloved
• Black’s, the stationers
• Harry Mutlar, Daisy’s brother, ‘rather a gawky youth’
• Frank Mutlar, another brother
• Mr Mutlar, Daisy’s father
• Mr. Peters, the waiter at Lupin and Daisy’s big engagement party
• Mr. Burwin-Fosselton, one of the ‘Holloway Comedians’, who gives gives his wild impersonation of Henry Irving to Charles, Carrie and guests
• Mr Padge, a ‘very vulgar-looking man… who appeared to be all moustache’
• the local laundress
• Mrs. Fernlosse, ‘quite a grand lady, living in one of those large houses in the Camden Road’
• Smirksons’, the drapers, in the Strand
• Carrie’s mother who they visit for Christmas
• ‘the dear old Reverend John Panzy Smith, who married us’
• ‘a young fellow named Moss’ who shocks Charles at the Christmas lunch by grabbing a sprig of mistletoe and kissing all the ladies including Carrie
• the unnamed rude man who opens the door to Gowing’s house when he is away
• ‘Mr. Murray Posh was a tall, fat young man’ and rival for Daisy Mutlar’s hand
• Job Cleanands, owner of Job Cleanands and Co., Stock and Share Brokers, who turns out to be a crook
• Mr. and Mrs. Treane, members of their congregation
• the rude and impertinent young Griffin boys next door
• Mr Griffin, their rude father
• Captain Welcut of the East Acton Volunteers
• Mrs Lupkin, kind to Carrie at the Volunteers Ball
• Putley the plumber
• Teddy Finsworth, an old school friend of Charles’s
• Mr. Edgar Paul Finsworth (of Finsworth and Pultwell), owner of a nice house, Watney Lodge, ‘only a few minutes’ walk from Muswell Hill Station’
• Mrs Finsworth, defender of her rather aggressive dogs
• Mr Short, luncheon guest at Mr Finsworth’s
• Mr. Hardfur Huttle, ‘a very clever writer for the American papers’
• Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Hillbutter, Mrs. Field, Mr. and Mrs. Purdick, Mr. Pratt, Mr. R. Kent – guests at Mr Franching’s dinner party in Peckham
• Mr. Gilbert E. Gillam O. Crowbillon of Crowbillon Hall, the most valued customer of the firm Charles works for
• Mr. Mezzini, Mr. Birks Spooner – guests at a meat-tea given by the James’s of Sutton
• ‘Lillie Girl’, nickname of Mr and Mrs Posh’s daughter, ‘very tall, rather plain, and I thought she was a little painted round the eyes’, who, right at the end of the text, we discover is engaged to Lupin

My point being that it’s quite an extended world, isn’t it. Certainly most of the characters are from the lower middle and tradesmen classes the book is intended to portray, but there are also quite wealthy people like the Poshes and the Finsworths, not to mention the egregious American, Mr Hardfur Huttle who dominates the book’s ending. There are at least 70 characters in all.

In other words the book is a good deal more panoramic than people give it credit for, and the sheer number of people Charles interacts with helps to give the book, although it is ostensibly just about Charles and Carrie and Lupin, a surprising sense of capaciousness.

Making do and mending

I could not help thinking (as I told her) that half the pleasures of life were derived from the little struggles and small privations that one had to endure at the beginning of one’s married life.

Their world of little means and scraping by and making do and always counting the pennies is continually present. When Charles tells Carrie the big news that he’s been promoted and had a significant pay rise:

I need not say how dear Carrie received this joyful news. With perfect simplicity she said: ‘At last we shall be able to have a chimney-glass for the back drawing-room, which we always wanted.’ I added: ‘Yes, and at last you shall have that little costume which you saw at Peter Robinson’s so cheap.’

It is funny and pitiful at the same time. They are not poor, Charles can buy whiskey and champagne when he wants to. But only the cheap brands, and he smokes cheap cigars and has to fight with tradesmen about the costs of everything. He doesn’t buy an address book when he needs a new one, he buys ‘a cheap address book’.

It is a tiny detail but poignantly telling that they turn down an invitation to Miss Bird’s wedding, not so much because they’ve only met her a few times but because ‘it means a present’. I.e. they can’t really afford one. What a world of careful self-denial in that short, clipped phrase.

Charles has been steadily employed at Perkupp’s for 20 years and is used to getting a £10-a-year pay raise and they can afford an annual holiday. But only at ‘good old Broadstairs’ and, as mentioned above, happily put up with a boarding house near the station because, after all, one on the cliffs with a view would be a bit too expensive.

So it is in no way a tragically confined life, as the pitiful existence of the truly poverty stricken is in A Child of the Jago (1896) or Liza of Lambeth (1897). There is cheap champagne and card parties and evenings of dominoes or music. There is fun and life. But no avoiding the continual sense that overall their existence is narrow and scrimped.

Concision

Something else which has made the Diary a classic is its pithiness. Usually the Victorians, and their descendants, the Edwardians, wrote at lugubrious length in their fiction, whereas one of the book’s qualities is its crispness and clarity. Obviously this comes with the diary format, and the sense the author is writing brief notes for his own use. The best of these entries are masterpieces of charged brevity.

MAY 4. Carrie’s mother returned the Lord Mayor’s invitation, which was sent to her to look at, with apologies for having upset a glass of port over it. I was too angry to say anything.

Those two sentences say a huge amount. The fact they sent Carrie’s mother the invitation in the first place, to show off and share their pride in the invitation, and the rather claustrophobic presence of the mother-in-law; the rather inevitable fact that the mother spoils it, and the precise detail that it is a glass of port wine she spills; Charles’s characteristic seething rage at this petty accident and the characteristic way he cannot express it. ‘I was too angry to say anything’ sums up countless incidents throughout the book. Charles is a man of boundless silent seething. So these two short sentences are a perfect example of the aphoristic power of ‘the diary entry’ as a genre.

Part of the appeal is the way the mundaneness of his life, with its little psychological inflections, can be captured in the briefest of entries. After Gowing tells Charles he has ruined his favourite walking stick by painting it a shiny new black colour, Charles is (as so often) mortified and does his best to make amends. Hence:

MAY 22. Purchased a new stick mounted with silver, which cost seven-and-sixpence (shall tell Carrie five shillings), and sent it round with nice note to Gowing.

‘Shall tell Carrie five shillings’ says everything about the little velleities and grace notes of married life, manages to be sweet and funny at the same time.

It’s true that some of the set-piece scenes are much, much longer, go on for pages and can be very funny too. But a lot of the pleasure comes from these quick little hits, these bite-size bursts of insight into the protagonist’s everyday life and little fusses.

Charles Pooter’s jokes

Another part of the book’s complicated mixture of humour and pathos derives from Charles’s recounting of the many awful jokes he and those around him make. He is continually making terrible puns which crack his wife and friends up, but not his savvy disrespectful son and certainly not the numerous tradesmen and other ‘outsiders’ who never seem to show Charles the respect he feels he deserves.

APRIL 12. Gowing began his usual sniffing, so, anticipating him, I said: ‘You’re not going to complain of the smell of paint again?’ He said: ‘No, not this time; but I’ll tell you what, I distinctly smell dry rot.’ I don’t often make jokes, but I replied: ‘You’re talking a lot of dry rot yourself.’ I could not help roaring at this, and Carrie said her sides quite ached with laughter. I never was so immensely tickled by anything I have ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook.

MAY 25. Carrie brought down some of my shirts and advised me to take them to Trillip’s round the corner. She said: ‘The fronts and cuffs are much frayed.’ I said without a moment’s hesitation: ‘I’m ’frayed they are.’ Lor! how we roared. I thought we should never stop laughing.

NOVEMBER 16. I was starting for the office, when Lupin appeared, with a yellow complexion, and said: ‘Hulloh! Guv, what priced head have you this morning?’ I told him he might just as well speak to me in Dutch. He added: ‘When I woke this morning, my head was as big as Baldwin’s balloon.’ On the spur of the moment I said the cleverest thing I think I have ever said; viz: ‘Perhaps that accounts for the parashooting pains.’ We roared.

JANUARY 3. ‘Do you know anything about chalk pits, Guv?’ I said: ‘No, my boy, not that I’m aware of.’ Lupin said: ‘Well, I give you the tip; chalk pits are as safe as Consols, and pay six per cent at par.’ I said a rather neat thing, viz.: ‘They may be six per cent. at par, but your pa has no money to invest.’ Carrie and I both roared with laughter.

FEBRUARY 11. Gowing dropped in just in time, bringing with him a large sheet, with a print of a tailless donkey, which he fastened against the wall. He then produced several separate tails, and we spent the remainder of the evening trying blindfolded to pin a tail on in the proper place. My sides positively ached with laughter when I went to bed.

But even when they’re terrible, the reader is encouraged to laugh along with these jokes because they embody the humour of the character himself; their very badness is testament to the unchanging nature of the character himself, who we’ve come to sympathise with, as in all the best sitcoms. In a way, the badness of the jokes is what makes them funny, because we are not laughing at the joke itself but at the way the sweet and dim characters find it funny, and that is endearing.

Englishness

Many critics and later writers have praised the book for its essential Englishness. I would say theis ‘Englishness’ consists in the Diary‘s sense of constant embarrassment and humiliation.

This is exemplified in chapter 18 when Charles and Carrie accept a kind invitation to a dance given by the East Acton Volunteers, arrive late at the dance hall, help themselves to a delicious dinner, with plenty of champagne and ices and a cigar only to discover that… this wasn’t free provision and part of the invitation – it has to be paid for! As the waiter patiently explains:

‘Your party’s had four suppers at 5s. a head, five ices at 1s., three bottles of champagne at 11s. 6d., a glass of claret, and a sixpenny cigar for the stout gentleman—in all £3 0s. 6d!’ I don’t think I was ever so surprised in my life.

Never so surprised nor humiliated, Charles manages to scrape together almost all the money, lacking a few shillings which he promises to pay later. But this means that, when he and Carrie, at the end of the evening, take a cab back to North London, or at least to the Angel Islington which is far as the cabbie will take them, it’s only when they disembark that Charles realises he has no cash on him. The cab driver calls him every name under the sun and violently pulls his beard, all within view of a policeman who, when he learns Charles and Carrie have taken a long cab journey but cannot pay the driver, has no sympathy for them. They then have to walk the last two miles to Holloway, late at night, in the pouring rain, seething with humiliation and embarrassment.

The entire scene is a kind of apotheosis of English shame and embarrassment but the book is packed with plenty of other examples. Take the passage towards the end when Charles is being shown round Mr. Edgar Paul Finsworth’s drawing room full of fine pictures and Charles remarks of one of the portraits that ‘there was something about the expression of the face that was not quite pleasing. It looked pinched.’

Mr. Finsworth sorrowfully replied: ‘Yes, the face was done after death—my wife’s sister.’ I felt terribly awkward and bowed apologetically, and in a whisper said I hoped I had not hurt his feelings.

‘I felt terribly awkward.’ That could be Charles Pooter’s motto and also stand as the core essence of  a certain type of Englishness.

The final chapters

Possibly I’m influenced by reading in the introduction to the OUP edition, and in Wikipedia, that the last four chapters were added after the magazine serialisation was complete, and were written specially for the book edition – but they felt significantly different from everything else that had preceded.

Previously it had been a dawdling, enjoyably aimless diary of a suburban nobody’s quiet life and footling concerns but in the added chapters the narrative suddenly felt like the authors had decided it was A Novel and so needed to have a sense of a plot and of a climactic ending.

Hence the introduction of an unusually elaborate storyline wherein Lupin advises Perkupps’ oldest client, Gilbert E. Gillam O. Crowbillon, to leave the firm and use a rival. This ‘betrayal’ of the old firm mortified Charles and Mr Perkupp asks him to write a letter of apology to Crowbillon, explaining that his son is new at the firm and inexperienced in the ways of the City in the hope of winning him back. So far, so consistent with the mode of embarrassment and humiliation which characterises the earlier parts.

But then comes a Fairy Tale Ending. Crowbillon not only sends Lupin a check as thanks for giving him such good advice, but the firm Lupin recommended him to, Gylterson and Sons, hires Lupin and at the princely salary of £200 a year, which it is hinted is comparable to Charles’s pay (I don’t think we ever learn Charles’s precise salary).

As a result Lupin hires rooms in the far more fashionable district of Bayswater and announces he is engaged to the daughter of the well-off Posh family, who sell hats across the North of England and are opening ‘branch establishments at New York, Sydney, and Melbourne, and [are] negotiating for Kimberley and Johannesburg.’ Suddenly, Lupin is rich!

And although Charles’s letter fails to win back Crowbillon, in the very last pages we meet again a rather loud-mouthed opinionated American Hardfur Huttle, who had made his first appearance at a dinner party which he dominates with his none-too-subtle opinions.

Right at the very end of the book, and out of the blue, this American summons Charles to his hotel to tell him he’s been impressed by him and his firm and so will be directing an important American friend to give Perkupp his business! With the result that, right at the very end of the novel, Mr Perkupp grandly rewards Charles for bringing in the new American client by buying and giving Charles the freehold to ‘The Laurels’, an act of stunning generosity which leaves Carrie crying with joy and Charles sending out for champagne to celebrate with his old muckers, Gowing and Cummings.

My point being: chapters 18 to 24, although they continue with the same characters and include many of the same kinds of social embarrassments, nonetheless feel significantly different from their predecessors, because they suddenly feel like they have a direction and a plot, and because that plot acquires an increasingly fairy tale quality of happiness and (cheap) champagne all round.

The meandering, silly and inconsequential charm of the opening chapters which didn’t appear to have any direction or purpose feel long gone and something of the book’s initial charm and innocence is lost as a result

Related links

• The Diary of A Nobody online