Reception & reputation

Reception & reputation of the Diary

Not much notice was taken of the Diary on its first book appearance, as the publisher conceded much later. Nor were the few reviews that did appear 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.

It is clear that the Diary was a “sleeper” that gradually made its way by personal recommendation. It only started to hit its stride among the wider public in the years leading up to World War I. When Arrowsmith’s released a new edition in October 1910, it was prefaced with some fulsome comments from a few admirers, which the company apparently had solicited directly for the purpose. (It is significant that, in a departure from normal practice, no quotations from reviews were included.) 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 that had plunged Europe into war. Those were values that the Modernists 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” (203). 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” (199): in short, middle-aged sentimental Tories 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 J.B. Priestley. “Poor Mr. Pooter, with his little vanities, his simplicity, his timidity, his goodness of heart,” said the left-wing novelist, “is not simply a figure of fun, but one of those innocent, lovable fools who are dear to the heart” (116). 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.”[1] Even so stringent a critic as Evelyn Waugh spoke of it as “the funniest book in the world” and annotated his own copy of it in minute detail.[2] By the 1950s its reputation had virtually stabilised, and it no longer seemed insincere for critics to speak of it seriously as “a great work of art.”[3]

Plenty of people since then have agreed with that evaluation. 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. Social historians such as 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.”[4] As recently as October 2003 a survey of journalists on the London 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 such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Wilde’s Dorian Gray and James’s Portrait of a Lady.[5] 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 and several radio dramatisations.

In short, the Pooters are among those literary characters that educated people are assumed to know about, as regular mentions of 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 who like it seem to feel they have to be defensive about it, for example. 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.[6] But whether the humour is really distinctively “English” is for each reader to decide.

[1] Grossmith (1933), 198.

[2] Waugh (1930). Waugh’s extensive annotations are discussed in another page on this site.

[3] Lancaster (1951), 995.

[4] Tindall (1970), 230; Wilson (1989), 8.

[5] McCrum (2003), 1-2.

[6] Holt (2000), 23.