Why did the Grossmiths never speak of the Diary?

The Diary has pleased several generations with its humour and has been a palpable influence on talented writers right up to the present. But very little is known of the circumstances which produced it. Whether Burnand commissioned it for Punch, or whether the brothers offered the idea to him, is unknown. Burnand's own memoirs, in two hefty volumes published while the brothers were still alive, mention neither them nor the Diary. All we can say is that, if the idea was suggested to him, Burnand would surely have reacted positively. During his eight years as editor he had softened the magazine's political radicalism and had taken its humour down-market, from pillorying the misdeeds of the great to celebrating the misadventures of the little man. In pursuit of this new comic vein, Burnand was already exploiting spoof diaries. There was a "Dogberry's Diary" about an inept policeman in a column adjacent to the second episode of the Diary, a "Diary of a Pessimist," and an "Extract from the Diary of a Dyspeptic." Another long-running feature in Punch was a mock diary called "Essence of Parliament. Extracted from the Diary of Toby, MP."

Even less, if possible, is known of the Grossmiths' own attitude to the work which alone has preserved their names. No original manuscripts have survived, and most of the brothers' private papers have been destroyed. None of their few letters refer to it. And although the brothers' autobiographical volumes review their active careers over many hundreds of pages, nowhere do they devote so much as a single sentence to the work which is their only surviving memorial.

Curiously, not one of the interviews which George gave to journalists in the 1890s had any substantive references to it either. The fullest of these interviews was by Raymond Blathwayt, a pioneer in what was then a new journalistic format. He interviewed George less than a year after the Diary was published. It is inconceivable that Blathwayt did not ask him about it, yet it was never mentioned in the resulting article. Such a transparent omission surely implies an agreement to keep off the subject.

How can this be explained? It may be, and has been, argued that the Grossmiths never regarded the Diary as anything more than a jeu d'esprit, thrown off in light-hearted moments between weightier and more profitable commitments. But there may be another explanation: the judgements passed on their book by its first reviewers.

Not a great deal of notice was taken of the Diary on its first book appearance, as the publisher conceded much later on. Nor were the reviews particularly favourable. Only the Saturday Review was positive and thoughtful; the rest ranged from the indifferent to the downright hostile. At least three reviewers, and probably influential ones, simply failed to get the joke. "A photographic representation of middle-class boredom and horseplay," snarled the weekly Athenaeum, accusing George Grossmith of vulgarity, snobbishness and -- unkindest cut of all -- of being not funny enough. Another reviewer closed his short notice with the bored observation that it was "rather difficult to get really interested in the sayings and doings" of the Pooters. Yet another called it an "appalling, merciless, horribly true" study of vulgarity, but if he found it funny as well, he kept it to himself. The only American review now traceable spoke in politely lukewarm tones of its "quiet, commonplace, everyday joking" which was unlikely to appeal much to the transatlantic reader.

It is clear, then, that the Diary was a "sleeper" which gradually made its way by personal recommendation. It only started to hit its stride among the wider public in the years leading up to the First World War. When Arrowsmith's released a new edition in October 1910 they prefaced it with some fulsome comments from a few admirers, which the company apparently had solicited directly for the purpose. (It is significant that they did not quote from reviews, the normal practice.) Whatever the effect of this odd strategy, the Diary started to sell busily, and this edition was frequently reprinted over the next decade.

After the War, the Diary may actually have benefited from the jeering hostility to all things Victorian of the generation led by Lytton Strachey and his brilliantly destructive essays Eminent Victorians (1918). Naturally, in Strachey's circle the Diary would have been scorned because it seemed to confirm, in its mild fashion, many of those parental values which had plunged Europe into war. Those were values which some of the survivors had made it their business to denounce.

But Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group were not the only arbiters of taste in post-war England. For those writers and critics who were anti-Modernist in their sympathies and practices, admiring the Diary, even singing its praises excessively, was a convenient way of nailing one's colours to the mast. One might defiantly celebrate its charm, while patronising it too. The characteristic note is struck by the satirical essayist and journalist D.B. Wyndham Lewis, writing in the early 1920s. For him the Pooters were "warm, living, breathing, futile, half-baked, incredibly alive and endearing boneheads". According to Lewis, its admirers at that time were the "salt of the earth," by which he meant men of the legal and political Establishment; people like "Lord Rosebery, Mr Augustine Birrell, Mr Hilaire Belloc, one of H.M. Ambassadors, and at least one Abbot of Benedictines": in short, middle-aged men of sentimental tastes who were nostalgic about the Diary's values but enjoyed having a condescending chuckle over it as well. Possibly they found reading about the misadventures of a Holloway clerk akin to sniggering at the antics of some new monkey at the zoo.

Nevertheless, more admirers soon appeared among people of very different stamp. By the end of the 1920s, we find it being praised in the same cosy phrases by the left-wing novelist J.B. Priestley: "poor Mr. Pooter, with his little vanities, his simplicity, his timidity, his goodness of heart, is not simply a figure of fun, but one of those innocent, lovable fools who are dear to the heart". By that date, in the eyes of the next generation of Grossmiths, the Diary was fully established, and with good reason, as "the family classic." By the 1950s its reputation had virtually stabilised, and it no longer seemed insincere for serious critics to speak of it as "a great work of art."

Plenty of people since then have agreed with him. Indeed, as the Diary approached and then passed its centenary, claims for its genius increased. It has been praised by working novelists like William Trevor and film directors like Mike Leigh, the director of Topsy Turvy (1999) in which George Grossmith, played by Martin Savage, has a central role. Social historians like Gillian Tindall and A.N. Wilson have called Pooter "the presiding shade of the whole period" and his Diary "the best comic novel in the language," claiming that the Pooters are the perfect emblems of "the really triumphant class of the Victorian period." As recently as October 2003 a survey of journalists on the London newspaper The Observer placed it among the hundred greatest novels of all time in any language, thereby putting it in the same league as near-contemporary canonical texts like Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Wilde's Dorian Gray and James' Portrait of a Lady. There have been at least three different stage versions, in 1954, 1975 and 1986, with the last, by Keith Waterhouse, drawing on his own two clever pastiches of the Diary). There have also been two television versions, one of them a film made in 1964 under the unlikely directorship of Ken Russell, and several radio readings and dramatisations.

In short, the Pooters are among those literary characters which educated people are assumed to be acquainted with, as continual allusions to them in quality journalism show. Perhaps one should limit that to British journalism. The Diary is hardly known outside its native country. American literary sophisticates, for example, who like it seem to feel they have to be defensive about it. The Diary is "a book that has been my prop and stay in troubled times," says one, as though only an arch, quasi-Biblical tone will ward off the raised eyebrows. But whether the humour is really distinctively "English" is for each reader to decide.

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