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Secret Life of Books
Keeping Up Appearances with the Pooters: The Diary of A Nobody
Ep. 73
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This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us a lot about fact. Published 1892, The Diary of a Nobody is about London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances. Most of all, it's about upwardly mobile lower middle class life in London at around the time of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the Grossmiths showed a side of life and a kind of comedy those other writers wouldn't touch. That's what made Diary of a Nobody a huge bestseller.
The Grossmith brothers were cultural barometers of their day. George Grossmith was the most famous character actor in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, and a stand-up comic, sketch writer, performer and artist. He wrote hit 18 comic opera, 600 songs, and endless short sketches. Weedon Grossmith (where is that name now?) was also a successful artist, writer, performer and actor.
In this episode we'll see a side of Victorian London we haven't delved into until now. Sophie and Jonty feel their oats as upwardly mobile creatives, or Upper Middle Bogans as we're called in Australia. And if anyone listening thinks that SLOB has turned SNOB, that's because The Diary of a Nobody was an unprecedentedly playful and loving look at the domestic anxieties, commuter travel, office politics and food and drink of a highly specific slice of class society in Victorian Britain.
This episode reveals what isn’t being talked about in the great books of the period. Sophie and Jonty ask why the Grossmith Brothers used the diary form to write their satire, and how this book in the inheritor of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell's voices. We'll learn how this diary shows the faultlines, tensions and unresolved issues about Victorian masculinity, making Diary of a Nobody a mini masterpiece.
Books mentioned in this episode:
George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; The Picture of Dorian Gray
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
HG Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, Love and Mr. Lewisham
George Gissing, New Grub Street
Bill Watterman, Calvin and Hobbes
Jim Davis, Garfield
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
George Orwell, Keep the Aspisistra Flying
Herman Melville, Bartlby the Scrivener
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
E.M. Forster, Howards End
Hanif Kureshi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Brown”
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