The 'New Humorists' and the Diary

The “New Humorists” and the Literary Influence of the Diary

In retrospect we can see that the Diary belongs broadly to a fictional line of development which was shaping in the early Nineties, one coherent enough for its practitioners to be called the “New Humorists,” and one whose influence is still palpable after more than a century, especially in television comedy. The widening of public education in England had produced a generation of readers who delighted in tales of the “little man”—that is to say, the adventures of heroes drawn from the lower segments of the middle class; heroes who are not patronised by their creators but treated with affectionate and understanding humour. The first great success in this mould was Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, whose publication as a serial overlapped with the Diary. It sold 200,000 copies in Britain alone.

This type of comedy was taken to new heights by H.G. Wells, who came from such a background himself. He was briefly linked to the New Humorists for his social comedies like Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). It was Wells who created perhaps the most typical of these “little man” heroes with his Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905). Kipps, a young draper’s clerk, inherits a fortune but finds it hard to live up to it. Kipps reacts much as Charles and Carrie Pooter might have reacted had they suddenly come into a lot of money. When his fortune is embezzled, he is more relieved than otherwise. His initiation into the habits and manners of the upper middle class is matter for rich humour, and Wells treats him with a tender, condescending concern that is quite reminiscent of the Diary.

In other specimens of New Humour comedy, suburban clerks did sometimes get a rather better press. Such jaunty, more sympathetic tales were usually set in a slightly higher social stratum than the one Wells dealt with, and belonged in spirit to the following, or what we might call the Lupin Pooter, generation. They reflected a new self-confidence about the suburban way of life. Even the conservative social analyst C.F.C. Masterman, no friend of suburbia, appreciated that in the growing suburbs there was to be found at least “a scene of busy activity, with interest in cricket and football results, ‘book talk,’ love-making, croquet and tennis parties for young men and women.”

Masterman is exactly right about what these new light fictions of suburbia celebrated. Typically, they retained the episodic form of the Diary, telling of the tribulations of married couples after their move to their new home. They have chapters on moving house, hiring and losing servants, dealing with tradesmen, troubles with the neighbours, tackling home repairs and improvements (and always failing), attending social functions and going on annual holidays.

These stories had no reformist ambitions. They sought merely to entertain and, perhaps, to reassure and validate the experiences of their newly suburbanized readers. It is striking that, though they are narrated from a male perspective, they nearly always feature a bumbling, good-natured husband whose follies have to be corrected by a managing and commonsensical wife. As the historian John Tosh puts it, “the distinctive hallmark of British domesticity was that it permeated the lives of men too—as husbands, as fathers, and as upholders of fireside virtues.”[1] It is as though, in these fictions, both author and characters are conspiring to feminize and revalue the male. They may have scenes set in the working world, but their focus is really on domestic detail and routine, its pleasures and pains, which are offered as the touchstones of reality. Indeed, in a typical example from Keble Howard’s The Smiths of Surbiton, in a chapter rather ironically titled “The Day’s Work,” the husband-worker, an insurance clerk, thoroughly disparages his own world, the world of work, as being entirely mundane and dull, compared to the world of home presided over by his wife. Some, probably most, of these fictions were written with one eye on the success of the Diary. This is certainly true of Barry Pain’s Eliza stories, describing episodes in the life of an unnamed city clerk, told in the first person. Pain copied some of the inventions of the Diary so explicitly that he invites a charge of plagiarism.

Mock-diaries and memoirs continued to be popular after the First World War and indeed right up to the end of the twentieth century. Henry Bashford’s Augustus Carp (1924) has a similar class background to the Diary and is clearly indebted to it. Carp’s parents’ home in Camberwell is called Mon Repos, and occasionally Bashford captures something of the Grossmiths’ inimitable manner:

this particular house had been named by the landlord in a foreign tongue, it must not be assumed that this nomenclature in any way met with my father’s approval. On the contrary, he had not only protested, but such was his distrust of French morality that he had always insisted, both for himself and others, upon a strictly English pronunciation (3).

But Carp is a portly and pompous hypocrite, and is merely laughable. His character has no shading to it as Pooter’s does. In America, Anita Loos’s witty Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady of the next year (1925) was much cleverer in pushing the technique of ingenuous self-exposure to new heights. All these probably stand behind the more recent rush of fictional diaries which are a fair match for them in their range of cultural reference and modish concerns: Christopher Matthew’s Diary of a Somebody (1978); Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982) and its successors; Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996).

The greatest novelist so far who has recorded his indebtedness to the Diary over a long period is Evelyn Waugh. In his Brideshead Revisited (1945) Waugh gives Lady Marchmain the Diary to read out loud of an evening. With her “beautiful voice and great humour of expression” she does much for her family’s psychological solace as they try to come to terms with young Sebastian Flyte’s growing alcoholism. She reads from it “with great spirit until ten o’clock” (149), and continues with it on a later evening.

Waugh was a life-long admirer of the Diary and he annotated his own copy of it in minute detail (Morton, 2005). Fifteen years before Brideshead, in 1930, he told the readers of his column in the Daily Mail :

I still think that the funniest book in the world is Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. If only people would really keep journals like that. Nobody wants to read other people’s reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years (85).

Waugh himself kept a diary for much of his life, full of minutiae and interesting for precisely the reasons he mentions. But he learnt more from the Diary than that. Take the scene where Pooter naively records his loved ones’ reaction to his literary pretensions:

Another thing which is disappointing to me is, that Carrie and Lupin take no interest whatever in my diary.

I broached the subject at the breakfast-table to-day. I said: “I was in hopes that, if anything ever happened to me, the diary would be an endless source of pleasure to you both; to say nothing of the chance of the remuneration which may accrue from its being published.”

Both Carrie and Lupin burst out laughing. [18 Dec 88. Ch.12]

Is there an echo of this in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), where the hero-victim Tony Last, landowner and cuckold, returns on Sunday morning to his house and to his adulterous wife’s horrible female friends?

Tony left the church porch and made his accustomed way to the hot houses; a gardenia for himself; some almost black carnations for the ladies. When he reached the room where they were sitting there was a burst of laughter. He paused on the threshold, rather bewildered.

“Come in, darling, it isn’t anything. It’s only we had a bet on what coloured buttonhole you’d be wearing and none of us won.”

They still giggled a little as they pinned on the flowers he had brought them. …

They left early, so as to reach London in time for dinner. In the car Daisy said, “Golly, what a house.”

“Now you can see what I’ve been through all these years.”

“My poor Brenda,” said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road (83-4).

Of course, Tony Last is miles removed socially from Charles Pooter, and the Grossmiths’ mode is comedy whereas Waugh’s is biting satire. But, as character types, the two do have one thing in common: that we are invited to see both of them as nearly extinct beings, dinosaurs due to be supplanted by a new and pushy generation operating on different moral principles. And, as a very self-conscious literary artist, what Waugh surely took from the Diary and applied to his own ends is its disciplined restraint, its delicately modulated tone and timing, and the subtle tricks whereby characters can be made to expose themselves in monologue or self-reported dialogue.

Waugh’s admiration for the Diary reminds us, too, that it is capable of cutting quite deeply. Some of the dreadful faux pas, more painful than comic, recorded so naively in its pages would not look out of place in one of Waugh’s satires. One thinks of the episode where Pooter remarks to the owner of a portrait drawing, that there is “something about the expression of the face that [is] not quite pleasing. It looks pinched.” The mournful reply: “Yes, the face was done after death—my wife’s sister.” [28 April. Ch.19]. It is no accident that comedy based on painful embarrassment arose first in the nineteenth century, because it is essentially metropolitan comedy, the comedy of a world where we are constantly meeting new people under circumstances which, through incomplete knowledge, are easily misjudged or misinterpreted. Ever since then, recollections of similar gaffes have become lodged in the darkest corner of most adults’ memory.

[1] Tosh (1998), 79.