Scorning the suburbs

It is a vexed question whether it is possible to read the Diary, at the start of the twenty-first century, in quite the way that it could be read at the end of the nineteenth. We recall that George Grossmith was given to playing pointless and nasty practical jokes on his social inferiors, and in his memoirs he tells these stories with a relish that makes the reader squirm today. Were the Grossmiths writing for the same élite to which they belonged themselves? Did they intend to give voice to their own class’s indignation at upstarts who dared to burst in among them? Was the original readership being quietly encouraged to scoff at the Pooters’ pretensions just as Theseus and his friends snigger at the play put on by the workmen at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Or is it that Pooter’s fatuity is supposed to be politically reassuring: a demonstration to the established middle class that the sinister fruit of Socialism would wither and die on the suburban vine?

Without treading on the treacherous ground of what the brothers may or may not have intended by their creation, it is arguable that the implied author of the Diary is crueller, more fiercely satirical, about the Pooters’ vanities and absurdities than we can now easily perceive. Consider, for instance, the emphasis on Pooter’s uxoriousness and domestication (“What’s the good of a home, if you are never in it? ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ that’s my motto”). Was this intended to be more laughable, even contemptible, than we may think it today? Is the implied author speaking, for the implied reader’s approval, from a world of male clubs and homosocial companionship? After all, the Diary, via the character of Hardfur Huttle (based on the rakish editor Frank Harris), expresses overt anti-suburban abuse directed against hook-on ties, constipated etiquette, nasty cheap champagne, and houses with pretentious entrances like a four-poster bedstead. Surely the implied reader is being guided away from totally rejecting Huttle’s views when even the Pooters are not entirely displeased to think that their son may be cast in the same mould.

Then there is the stress placed on Pooter’s taste in interior decoration. John Ruskin’s influential art criticism, which treated aesthetic judgements as a branch of ethics, may well have given this detail a much sharper edge in its original context than we are likely to give it today. So Pooter’s plaster stags’ heads which he nails up in the hall and proudly calls an “excellent imitation,” may be read as condemning him outright as not merely a pathetic vulgarian but morally deficient to boot.

Pursuing this line, it has been argued very recently that the Diary is a “suburban anti-vision” whose relationship to the emerging line of suburban literature is forcefully adversarial.[1] If the Grossmiths really intended to be contemptuous about their suburban hero, then their stance would have found a ready response at the time, as the social historian A. James Hammerton has explained:

Few readers of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction would be unaware of the cutting scorn aimed at white collar suburbanites, symbolic of all that was most threatening in philistine mass culture: servile work, degraded taste and aspirations beyond their station, an audience for the excesses of the manipulative yellow press and political deception. Two features distinguish this critique; it was constructed overwhelmingly through satire, for the entertainment of élites, which heightened the identification of the lower middle class with the absurd and pompous; and, at least on the surface, it was focused on the inanities of men rather than women.[2]

Certainly “cutting scorn” is no exaggeration. “I am not going to rot away my life in the suburbs,” cries Lupin Pooter [1 July 89. Ch.23], rejecting his father’s Holloway and all it stands for. There were plenty of people in his generation to agree with him. It was a popular theme, in and out of fiction, and well into the new century. Most of the descriptive phrases for those who dwelt in the suburbs were derogatory. Such people made up the ranks of “clerkdom” or “villadom”. They were the “lower middle class” or the “petty bourgeois”. They were “middle-brow” or, worse, had “foreheads villainous low.”

Simple snobbery accounted for much of this, ranging in tone from measured disdain to violent invective. “Clerkdom,” according to C.F.C. Masterman, is that vast body of men who spend their lives “in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters.” Such men are definable as Secure, Sedentary and Respectable. Their women go in for shopping and “pious sociabilities.” They “scatter and degrade” their energies on trivialities. And housing this mass of clerkdom is an ecological as much as a social problem. Their box-like dwellings are spreading outwards from London like an encroaching slime mould, a “gigantic plasmodium.” Masterman could see no end to it, and his distaste is palpable.

This was mild compared to the abuse coming from other quarters. In The Blight of Respectability the journalist Walter Gallichan cursed “villadom” for caring about nothing but money, the neighbours, curtains and carpets: they are people who have a lower quality of life than a savage. Even more aggressive was the journalist T.W.H. Crosland, who specialised in lively pieces of social commentary that targeted the contemporary woman or the Scots, among others. When he turned his pen on The Suburbans he scourged the way of life of people like the Pooters with the zest of one who knows an easy mark when he sees one. Just mentioning “hire-system gramophones” and “tinned soups” to his readers was apparently enough to raise a laugh. Even the novelist Pett Ridge, an observer more sympathetic than most, presumed to offer a “complete inventory” of what might be seen in the front windows of the houses, from pampas grass to a St Paul’s cathedral modelled in white wax.

The worst part of the charge was that the male suburbanite (for which read: clerk) had lost his virility. He had become feminized or sexless. They hardly deserved the name of men at all, when they had “no proud dreams and no proud lusts” to motivate them. The phrase is H.G. Wells’s: in The War of the Worlds and despite his own origins he puts it in the mouth of a character whose scorn Wells himself certainly shared at the time: that is, that most of the clerking class were so spineless they would trade freedom for security even if it meant being bred for food in cages by blood-sucking Martians. For Robert White clerks are “too peaceful to form unions and commit assaults; too orderly to assemble on Tower Hill and threaten riots; too sensitive and self-respecting to mouth out their grievances in Trafalgar Square or Hyde Park.” What seems at first a nod of approval is cancelled by the involuntary jeer, as what is presumably supposed to be praise comes out sounding more like a slight.

This perception runs like a nagging toothache through Shan Bullock’s documentary fiction Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk (1907). When the hero’s father hears that his son intends to take up such a career in London he expostulates: “You have the spirit of a slave, sir. A clerk! A creature with a pen behind its ear!” But Thorne goes ahead anyway, only to have Oliver, the cynical colleague of his own age in the Tax Office, drive home the message with self-lacerating scorn: “D’you think if we were men we’d be content to sit here toasting our toes at an office fire? Not likely! We’d be out doing something …”

The stress here is on “if we were men.” Robert Thorne sticks to his clerkship until one day he is spotted wheeling the pram on a Sunday morning by a couple of his bachelor colleagues. It is not quite that Thorne objects to being seen acting as a nursemaid. He is galled, rather, by his sense that, to the superior men, he has been cheeky enough to conduct any marital life at all on a hundred pounds a year. And class and gender roles are inextricably mingled, for he sees himself through their eyes “wheeling a perambulator like any counter-jumper”: that is, like a shop assistant. Being a clerk in a government office and a clerk in a shop were very different things in England, and to merge them was a serious insult. It is all too much: the Thornes emigrate to New Zealand soon after that, where men can be men, with or without a pram. (There could be a hint of the same charge of low virility in the Diary. Since the Pooters were very exceptional, as a late-Victorian fertile couple, in having only one child, it is not impossible that here is a sly hint that Pooter’s emasculation in the parlour and office extends to the bedroom.[3])

But if the Diary was intended to be rancorous, in this tradition of anti-suburban invective, then time, and the success of the New Humorists, has drawn its sting. Few modern readers are reluctant to find a kinship with Pooter and his circle. The Pooters inhabit a world we recognize, a world of small anxieties and small successes, familiar enough in households of similar status: the ineffectual do-it-yourself efforts; the pains of “entertaining” at home; dealing with inept and cheating tradesmen; handling the etiquette of an unfamiliar formal occasion. As an artistic creation, the world of The Laurels is easily recognisable, because nearly all British television comedy ultimately descends from the Diary and the New Humorists. Two obvious exemplars are Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “Bouquet”) and her relatives in the series Keeping Up Appearances (1990-95) and David Brent in The Office (2001-03). In such comedies we are invited to share and empathize more than to mock. Though they can be acutely embarrassing, these are comedies of involvement and recognition, although they are cleverly designed to make our reaction to the lead characters ambivalent.

Consider how true this is of Pooter. He has so many conflicting facets to his nature. He teeters on the brink of being a complacent bore and prig, small-minded, self-satisfied, and imperceptive. How can we be interested in a man whose ambitions focus on having his son commute on the same bus to the same office, or seeing his mustard and cress coming up in the garden? Who uses his diary to complain about the colour of his breakfast sausages? Whose only two friends are, we perceive, boring and stupid, and actually rather despise him and each other? We perceive him to be gauche, obtuse, censorious, timid, snobbish, conventional, culturally a philistine, uxorious to the point of being a little frightened of his wife, and incompetent in most practical matters. He fawns over his superiors and is scared of his inferiors, and is mocked, to different degrees, by everyone who knows him.

Yet, mostly, we like him. His is loyal, affectionate, hard-working, well-meaning, optimistic, unenvious and without a spiteful or hypocritical bone in his body. He is not so much pompous as innocently egotistical, and his ego is easily punctured. He loves his wife and son, and they love him. His job may be dull, but he likes it and is good at it. It is true that he harangues the servant, making her cry, and physically assaults a delivery boy once, but such behaviour has to be seen in the context of the time. For all his faults he is an endearing character. Our reaction is a little more ambivalent than the Victorians’, perhaps. We still laugh comfortably at the Pooters, whose ineptitude is (we hope) so much greater than our own; but we also laugh with them, indulgently if a little uncomfortably, since we are not sure how far we want to stand revealed, even to ourselves, as potentially Pooterish. Our rueful chuckle at their absurdities is made up of one part scorn to three parts sympathy. Whatever the Grossmiths intended, this is what has kept the Diary fresh and relevant for a very long time.

***

[1] Hapgood (2005) has argued this case.

[2] Hammerton, “Perils” (1999), 262.

[3] Hammerton, “Pooterism” (1999), 311 makes this point.