THE DIARY OF A NOBODY
WEBSITE
By
George Grossmith (1847-1912) & Weedon Grossmith (1854-1919)
|
On moving my hand above the surface of
the water, I experienced the greatest fright I ever received in the whole
course of my life; for imagine my horror on discovering my hand, as I
thought, full of blood. My first thought was that I had ruptured an
artery, and was bleeding to death . . . |
This
site offers information about that comic masterpiece The Diary of a Nobody, first
published in 1888-9 in Punch
. I am working on the first properly edited edition of the Diary and
associated contextual materials. If you have any information supplementing this
site, particularly about the circumstances which produced the Diary, I
would very much like to hear from you. Contact me at peter.morton AT
flinders.edu.au. This project is nearing completion, and I would like to
record my thanks to: Tony Joseph, George Grossmith’s
biographer and a
fund of information about his life and writings; Victoria Arrowsmith, Leon
Berger, Judith Flanders, Jim Hammerton, Paul Johnson, Helen Kent, Michael
Kilgarriff, Mark Samuels Lasner, Dil Porter, Andrew Prescott & John Turner.
ON
THIS SITE
A Grossmith Chronology
The Diary appears: the Punch version of
1888-9 and the book of 1892
Who wrote the Diary?
Biographical:
The brothers Grossmith
Why did the
Grossmiths apparently never speak of the Diary?
Was George Grossmith
a drug addict?
The Pooter
world: London, 1888-9
The Diary,
Pooter and Jack the Ripper
A bibliography of near-contemporary items relating to the Diary (to 1914)
A secondary
bibliography of the Diary (after 1914)
Shan Bullock's Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk (1907). Another (more miserable) view of the clerking life in London
|
New words and phrases in
the Diary |
OTHER LINKS
http://www.litnotes.co.uk/diary.htm by Val Pope has some sensible, well-informed comment about the Diary, prepared for British secondary school students who are studying the Diary alongside modern fictive diaries like Adrian Mole.
The text of the Diary is freely available from many sites, but few if any include Weedon's drawings.
My article on Evelyn Waugh's detailed annotations to his copy of the Diary in 1946 has been published in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter.
My article on the Diary comparing Pooter and Adrian Mole appeared in the Cross Currents section of the British magazine History Today in the issue for October 2005.
The editor Jerome K. Jerome commissioned a series (of six?) 'Nobodies at Home' for his magazine To-Day, from 4 May to 8 June 1895. Any information on this series welcome.
This collection
of materials and original text is copyright Peter Morton. I am grateful for
permission to reproduce other copyright materials.
This site works with Internet Explorer 6. Last updated: 30 May 2007