'It's the diary that makes the man. Where would Evelyn and Pepys have been if it had not been for their diaries?' reflects Pooter. He has a point. Those great seventeenth-century diarists do offer a remarkable window into the public life of their day, but even Pepys, an important public official, is remembered more for the intimate, homely details in his diary, not to mention the shameless self-revelations it contains.
Certainly Pooter is no Pepys: part of the joke is
the utter banality of his diary's content. But in its way the Diary is a valuable document of social history,
especially so because the sector of Victorian society with which it deals has,
despite its size, attracted few historians. It is not that it is deals with
topical matters, exactly. One looks in vain for any mention of the public events
of the day, even though the later1880s were wracked by public disturbances. We find
nothing about the great political issue of Home Rule for Ireland, or of the
Fenian terrorist bombings in London. The great recent celebration of Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee goes unmentioned. Nor does Pooter have anything to say about
the continual labour unrest which had marked the previous few years. Shops in
the West End had been looted by gangs in the harsh winter of early 1886,
followed by the Bloody Sunday riots of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square at
the end of 1887, events which had horrified many people of Pooter's class and
above. It is less surprising that there is no mention of the 'autumn of
terror': the ten weeks late in 1888, while the Diary was running, which saw Jack the Ripper at work in
Whitechapel. The last and most hideous murder took place on the night of Friday
9 November, the day on which Pooter records that his 'endeavours to discover
who tore the sheets out of my diary still fruitless.'
What the Diary does contain is a wealth of cultural signifiers. It is a mine of small, striking, easily-overlooked details which help illuminate, and in turn are illuminated by, the masterpieces of realistic fiction by Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and Arnold Bennett: such matters as bicycling and ballooning, manicuring and newspaper controversies about marriage, 'aesthetic' decorative affectations, vulgar Christmas cards, parasols five feet long, patent bow ties and financial frauds. Even Pooter's painting the bath is realistic. A contemporary household manual specifically mentions re-enamelling the bathtub as a job which the amateur could tackle -- though not, admittedly, using red paint. We can discover how people of Pooter's class talked to servants and tradespeople, and, far more unusually, how they talked back. We find out much about their domestic amusements, especially spiritualist seances; their commuting habits and their relations with their family members and their friends and social superiors. Most of all, perhaps, we notice Pooter's repeated and usually futile attempts to assert his male authority.
The Dairy
raises numerous interesting queries about the coming erosion of respectability
and deference in Edwardian England; about feminised masculinity in the suburban
middle classes, and about the satisfactions and tensions of marriage and
changes in pre-marital relations among the younger generation.