Embedded Files
“It’s the diary that makes the man. Where would Evelyn and Pepys have been if it had not been for their diaries?” reflects Pooter [18 Dec 88. Ch.12]. He has a point. Those great seventeenth-century diarists do offer a remarkable window into the public life of their day, but even Pepys, an important civil servant, is remembered most for the homely details and shameless self-revelations in his diary. Certainly Pooter is no Pepys: the joke, of course, is the excruciating banality of his diary. But in its way the Diary is a valuable document of social history, especially so because the sector of Victorian society with which it deals has attracted few historians, despite its size.
It is not that the Diary deals with important topical matters. One looks in vain for any mention of the public events of the day, even though the later 1880s were wracked by public disturbances. We find nothing about the great issue of Home Rule for Ireland, or about the Fenian terrorist bombings in London. The Match Girls’ strike of July 1888, which was recognised at the time as being a turning point in labour history, goes unmentioned. So do the Bloody Sunday riots of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square at the end of 1887, events that had horrified many people of Pooter’s class and above.
It is less surprising, no doubt, that there is no mention of the “autumn of terror”: the ten weeks late in 1888, while the Diary was in mid-stream, that saw Jack the Ripper killing women in Whitechapel. The last and most hideous murder took place on the night of Friday 9 November, the very day on which Pooter records that his “endeavours to discover who tore the sheets out of my diary still fruitless.”[1]
What the Diary does contain is a wealth of cultural signifiers. It is a mine of small, striking, easily-overlooked details that help illuminate, and in turn are illuminated by, the masterpieces of realistic fiction by Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Arnold Bennett: such matters as bicycling and ballooning, manicuring and newspaper controversies about marriage, “aesthetic” decorative affectations, rude Christmas cards, parasols five feet long, patent bow-ties, and financial frauds. Even Pooter’s painting the bath is realistic. A contemporary household manual specifically mentions re-enamelling the bathtub as a job that the amateur could tackle--though not, admittedly, using red paint. We can discover how people of Pooter’s class talked to servants and tradespeople, and, far more unusually, how they talked back. We find out much about their domestic amusements, especially spiritualist séances; about their commuting habits and their relations with their family members and their friends and social superiors.
Most of all, perhaps, we notice Pooter’s repeated and usually futile attempts to assert his male authority. The Diary offers interesting insights into the steady erosion of respectability and deference in Edwardian England; about feminised masculinity in the suburban middle classes; and about the satisfactions and tensions of marriage and changes in pre-marital relations among the younger generation.[2]
The Grossmiths’ first brilliant stroke was to house the Pooters in Holloway. For a while, earlier in the nineteenth century, this district had been a geographically distinctive place--a “walking suburb” close enough to the City for pedestrian commuters. In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), which is apparently set somewhat earlier, Reginald Wilfer is a junior clerk with “a limited salary and an unlimited family.” Even then, Holloway was the natural habitat for such a man. Dickens’s description of the locality gives an extra resonance to the name of the Pooters’ street, Brickfield Terrace:
His home was in the Holloway region north of London, and then divided from it by fields and trees. Between Battle Bridge [the area around King’s Cross] and that part of the Holloway district in which he dwelt, was a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors. Skirting the border of this desert, by the way he took, when the light of its kiln-fires made lurid smears on the fog, R. Wilfer sighed and shook his head (33).
His home was in the Holloway region north of London, and then divided from it by fields and trees. Between Battle Bridge [the area around King’s Cross] and that part of the Holloway district in which he dwelt, was a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors. Skirting the border of this desert, by the way he took, when the light of its kiln-fires made lurid smears on the fog, R. Wilfer sighed and shook his head (33).
By the 1880s the brick fields lay buried under their own product and Holloway was rapidly ceasing to be what most people understood by a London “suburb” at all. Mrs. James “of Sutton” lives in a proper suburb; the Pooters just live somewhere in the shapeless sprawl of the largest city on earth.
Holloway was definitely on the slide as the century closed. The well-to-do had always shunned it. By the Pooters’ day, parts of it had become distinctly seedy, especially to the south, running down to King’s Cross railway station. In his slum novel Thyrza (1887), George Gissing drew a gruesome pen-portrait of “Pooter country” at this date:
Caledonian Road is a great channel of traffic running directly north from King’s Cross to Holloway. It is doubtful whether London can show any thoroughfare of importance more offensive to eye and ear and nostril. You stand at the entrance to it, and gaze into a region of supreme ugliness; every house front is marked with meanness and inveterate grime; every shop seems breaking forth with mould or dry-rot; the people who walk here appear one and all to be employed in labour that soils body and spirit. Journey on the top of a tram-car from King’s Cross to Holloway, and civilisation has taught you its ultimate achievement in ignoble hideousness. You look off into narrow side-channels where unconscious degradation has made its inexpugnable home, and sits veiled with refuse. You pass above lines of railway, which cleave the region with black-breathing fissure. You see the pavements half occupied with the paltriest and most sordid wares; the sign of the pawnbroker is on every hand; the public-houses look and reek more intolerably than in other places. The population is dense, the poverty is undisguised. All this northward-bearing tract, between Camden Town on the one hand and Islington on the other, is the valley of the shadow of vilest servitude. Its public monument is a cyclopean prison [Pentonville]: save for the desert around the Great Northern Goods Depôt, its only open ground is a malodorous cattle-market. In comparison, Lambeth is picturesque and venerable, St. Giles’s is romantic, Hoxton is clean and suggestive of domesticity, Whitechapel is full of poetry, Limehouse is sweet with sea-breathings.[3]
Caledonian Road is a great channel of traffic running directly north from King’s Cross to Holloway. It is doubtful whether London can show any thoroughfare of importance more offensive to eye and ear and nostril. You stand at the entrance to it, and gaze into a region of supreme ugliness; every house front is marked with meanness and inveterate grime; every shop seems breaking forth with mould or dry-rot; the people who walk here appear one and all to be employed in labour that soils body and spirit. Journey on the top of a tram-car from King’s Cross to Holloway, and civilisation has taught you its ultimate achievement in ignoble hideousness. You look off into narrow side-channels where unconscious degradation has made its inexpugnable home, and sits veiled with refuse. You pass above lines of railway, which cleave the region with black-breathing fissure. You see the pavements half occupied with the paltriest and most sordid wares; the sign of the pawnbroker is on every hand; the public-houses look and reek more intolerably than in other places. The population is dense, the poverty is undisguised. All this northward-bearing tract, between Camden Town on the one hand and Islington on the other, is the valley of the shadow of vilest servitude. Its public monument is a cyclopean prison [Pentonville]: save for the desert around the Great Northern Goods Depôt, its only open ground is a malodorous cattle-market. In comparison, Lambeth is picturesque and venerable, St. Giles’s is romantic, Hoxton is clean and suggestive of domesticity, Whitechapel is full of poetry, Limehouse is sweet with sea-breathings.[3]
This is what the Pooters must see, for example, when they travel by bus to Islington via King’s Cross for their disastrous evening’s entertainment at the Tank theatre. Gissing’s is a gloomy picture indeed, and charged with his typically ironic disgust, but it is certain that squalor was never very far away. One street, Campbell Road, housed six noisy brothels by the 1880s and had picked up the label of “the worst street in North London”-- an award for which there was surely plenty of competition. Twenty years later, other streets in the area were said to be notable for “both poverty and vice,” as reflected in the condition of the local schoolchildren.[4] Broadly speaking, the demographic spectrum ranged from the unpretentious working classes, through the lower-lower middle classes struggling to become respectable, as far as the upper-lower middle classes (to which the Pooters belong) painfully eager to cling on to and consolidate their status.
This is what the Pooters must see, for example, when they travel by bus to Islington via King’s Cross for their disastrous evening’s entertainment at the Tank theatre. Gissing’s is a gloomy picture indeed, and charged with his typically ironic disgust, but it is certain that squalor was never very far away. One street, Campbell Road, housed six noisy brothels by the 1880s and had picked up the label of “the worst street in North London”-- an award for which there was surely plenty of competition. Twenty years later, other streets in the area were said to be notable for “both poverty and vice,” as reflected in the condition of the local schoolchildren.[4] Broadly speaking, the demographic spectrum ranged from the unpretentious working classes, through the lower-lower middle classes struggling to become respectable, as far as the upper-lower middle classes (to which the Pooters belong) painfully eager to cling on to and consolidate their status.
It seems that by the 1880s Holloway had become a convenient butt for any novelist wanting to set a scene where pathos and vulgarity had to be interwoven. For example, when Ernest Le Breton, the hero of Grant Allen’s Socialist novel Philistia (1884), loses his schoolmaster’s job and has to search for lodgings with his wife and baby, it is through the back streets of Holloway that the family tramps. They look for cheap rooms, and “they saw a great many, more or less dear, and more or less dirty and unsuitable, until their poor hearts really began to sink within them” (Ch.23).
It seems that by the 1880s Holloway had become a convenient butt for any novelist wanting to set a scene where pathos and vulgarity had to be interwoven. For example, when Ernest Le Breton, the hero of Grant Allen’s Socialist novel Philistia (1884), loses his schoolmaster’s job and has to search for lodgings with his wife and baby, it is through the back streets of Holloway that the family tramps. They look for cheap rooms, and “they saw a great many, more or less dear, and more or less dirty and unsuitable, until their poor hearts really began to sink within them” (Ch.23).
But things turn out better in Allen’s novel than they do in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). In Gissing’s novel Mrs. Yule, the working-class wife of the aging hack author Alfred Yule, hails from Holloway and, unknown to her irritable husband, returns there surreptitiously to visit her relatives. The fury that Yule unleashes on his miserable wife after an intrusion from Holloway speaks volumes about the perceived gulf between that suburb and the shabby but respectable St Paul’s Crescent, Camden Town, where the Yules live. It matters not a whit that they live in a house no better than the Pooters’, and actually on a rather smaller income. Gissing was a topographical diagnostician of unerring accuracy about such matters.
But things turn out better in Allen’s novel than they do in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). In Gissing’s novel Mrs. Yule, the working-class wife of the aging hack author Alfred Yule, hails from Holloway and, unknown to her irritable husband, returns there surreptitiously to visit her relatives. The fury that Yule unleashes on his miserable wife after an intrusion from Holloway speaks volumes about the perceived gulf between that suburb and the shabby but respectable St Paul’s Crescent, Camden Town, where the Yules live. It matters not a whit that they live in a house no better than the Pooters’, and actually on a rather smaller income. Gissing was a topographical diagnostician of unerring accuracy about such matters.
But to all this Charles Pooter is sublimely indifferent. Gissing’s “ignoble hideousness” means nothing to him, and that is a very pointed part of the joke. When his boss Mr Perkupp presents him with the gift of the freehold of his “little house,” he hopes to live out the rest of his days there. He could still have been living there and contemplating retirement in 1910, when a nearby street was the sinister background to the Crippen murder case. Indeed, Dr Crippen, who looked like a stereotypical clerk, was supposedly known as the “Mr. Pooter of crime.”[5]
But to all this Charles Pooter is sublimely indifferent. Gissing’s “ignoble hideousness” means nothing to him, and that is a very pointed part of the joke. When his boss Mr Perkupp presents him with the gift of the freehold of his “little house,” he hopes to live out the rest of his days there. He could still have been living there and contemplating retirement in 1910, when a nearby street was the sinister background to the Crippen murder case. Indeed, Dr Crippen, who looked like a stereotypical clerk, was supposedly known as the “Mr. Pooter of crime.”[5]
Whether the Pooters’ home, The Laurels, is imaginary or not has been disputed. Certainly houses of that type do still exist by their thousands in Holloway and similar suburbs.[6] However, in a radio talk in 1954, Philip Carr, who knew the Grossmith family well as a child, was certain that The Laurels was modelled exactly on the house occupied by George and Rosa Grossmith after their marriage, which was in Blandford Square, Marylebone, nowhere near Holloway.
Whether the Pooters’ home, The Laurels, is imaginary or not has been disputed. Certainly houses of that type do still exist by their thousands in Holloway and similar suburbs.[6] However, in a radio talk in 1954, Philip Carr, who knew the Grossmith family well as a child, was certain that The Laurels was modelled exactly on the house occupied by George and Rosa Grossmith after their marriage, which was in Blandford Square, Marylebone, nowhere near Holloway.
Whatever its location, The Laurels is thoroughly realised. (The absurdity of giving such a house a name resonant of spacious detached villas is supposed to be obvious.) It contains six main rooms in two storeys above a half-basement. The latter has two rooms, a kitchen at the back and the “breakfast parlour” with a sunken bay window, the upper half of which looks over the front garden. The Pooters use this a good deal, probably because it is cosy and warm. Of the three ground-floor rooms, the front one is the parlour, separated by folding doors from the drawing room (and dining room) that looks onto the rear garden. The remaining downstairs room is presumably the one referred to alternatively as the “back drawing room” or “sitting room.”
Whatever its location, The Laurels is thoroughly realised. (The absurdity of giving such a house a name resonant of spacious detached villas is supposed to be obvious.) It contains six main rooms in two storeys above a half-basement. The latter has two rooms, a kitchen at the back and the “breakfast parlour” with a sunken bay window, the upper half of which looks over the front garden. The Pooters use this a good deal, probably because it is cosy and warm. Of the three ground-floor rooms, the front one is the parlour, separated by folding doors from the drawing room (and dining room) that looks onto the rear garden. The remaining downstairs room is presumably the one referred to alternatively as the “back drawing room” or “sitting room.”
The upper floor is reached from a staircase rising from a small hall. Upstairs, the allocation of the bedrooms isn’t very clear. There is room only for three, two at the front and one at the back next to the bathroom. The main front bedroom has the back of a dressing table mirror visible in Weedon’s drawing, so we assume this is the marital bedroom. One entry says there is “no key to our bedroom door” [3 April 1888. Ch. 1]. Yet other references seem to make it equally plain that the Pooters have separate rooms, for we hear how Mrs. James “went into Carrie’s room to take off her bonnet, and remained there nearly an hour” [25 Aug 1888. Ch. 7]; and, later on, that “Carrie, who appeared very frightened, was standing outside her bed-room” [11 Nov 1888. Ch. 8]. Another time Pooter leaves at night a present and a note on his wife’s dressing table, which seems odd if they share a room.
The upper floor is reached from a staircase rising from a small hall. Upstairs, the allocation of the bedrooms isn’t very clear. There is room only for three, two at the front and one at the back next to the bathroom. The main front bedroom has the back of a dressing table mirror visible in Weedon’s drawing, so we assume this is the marital bedroom. One entry says there is “no key to our bedroom door” [3 April 1888. Ch. 1]. Yet other references seem to make it equally plain that the Pooters have separate rooms, for we hear how Mrs. James “went into Carrie’s room to take off her bonnet, and remained there nearly an hour” [25 Aug 1888. Ch. 7]; and, later on, that “Carrie, who appeared very frightened, was standing outside her bed-room” [11 Nov 1888. Ch. 8]. Another time Pooter leaves at night a present and a note on his wife’s dressing table, which seems odd if they share a room.
These conflicting statements may be a result of the habit, then current, of alluding delicately to the marital bedroom as the wife’s domain only. Indeed, in grander houses, the husband might well sleep sometimes in an adjacent “dressing room.” However, if the Pooters do sleep apart, then the second bedroom must be Charles’s and the third Lupin’s.
These conflicting statements may be a result of the habit, then current, of alluding delicately to the marital bedroom as the wife’s domain only. Indeed, in grander houses, the husband might well sleep sometimes in an adjacent “dressing room.” However, if the Pooters do sleep apart, then the second bedroom must be Charles’s and the third Lupin’s.
Where, then, does the maid Sarah sleep? Clearly upstairs, because Pooter goes there to paint her wash-stand. This is surprising in itself, for it is unlikely that in so small a house the servant would have had a bedroom. It was quite usual even in much larger houses for one or two servants to sleep in the kitchen on truckle beds. Further, in Weedon’s drawing, Sarah’s room has a dormer window, but this seems to conflict with his view of the frontage of The Laurels, which shows a flat roof and no attic.
Where, then, does the maid Sarah sleep? Clearly upstairs, because Pooter goes there to paint her wash-stand. This is surprising in itself, for it is unlikely that in so small a house the servant would have had a bedroom. It was quite usual even in much larger houses for one or two servants to sleep in the kitchen on truckle beds. Further, in Weedon’s drawing, Sarah’s room has a dormer window, but this seems to conflict with his view of the frontage of The Laurels, which shows a flat roof and no attic.
At any rate, Sarah surely had to make do with the scullery and wash-house beyond the kitchen for her ablutions, and the outdoors privy. It is unimaginable that she would have used the family’s bathroom. The latter may not have contained a lavatory fitting at that date. If not, then the Pooters must have used the same outdoors privy as their servant in the daytime and had chamber pots in the bedrooms at night.
At any rate, Sarah surely had to make do with the scullery and wash-house beyond the kitchen for her ablutions, and the outdoors privy. It is unimaginable that she would have used the family’s bathroom. The latter may not have contained a lavatory fitting at that date. If not, then the Pooters must have used the same outdoors privy as their servant in the daytime and had chamber pots in the bedrooms at night.
The household is maintained solely by the earnings of Mr Pooter. He has worked for Mr. Perkupp’s business in the City for twenty years. His duties are not very clear, but he keeps accounts, writes letters, and advises clients about their investments. From Monday to Saturday he commutes to the office by horse-drawn bus. It takes half an hour, and apparently it is acceptable to arrive at 9:15. Saturday is a half-day. He goes out to a restaurant for his dinner -- only his trendy son “lunches” during the week -- and is home by six-thirty or seven in time for tea, or, if there are visitors, “meat-tea.” Meal-times were in a state of flux, but in Pooter’s class the main meal was in the middle of the day or, at weekends, in the late afternoon. Pooter is disconcerted when his son proposes dining with him one evening as late as 8:20.[7]
The household is maintained solely by the earnings of Mr Pooter. He has worked for Mr. Perkupp’s business in the City for twenty years. His duties are not very clear, but he keeps accounts, writes letters, and advises clients about their investments. From Monday to Saturday he commutes to the office by horse-drawn bus. It takes half an hour, and apparently it is acceptable to arrive at 9:15. Saturday is a half-day. He goes out to a restaurant for his dinner -- only his trendy son “lunches” during the week -- and is home by six-thirty or seven in time for tea, or, if there are visitors, “meat-tea.” Meal-times were in a state of flux, but in Pooter’s class the main meal was in the middle of the day or, at weekends, in the late afternoon. Pooter is disconcerted when his son proposes dining with him one evening as late as 8:20.[7]
We do not know Pooter’s salary exactly, but it is certainly well above the average for clerks. Clerks were notoriously ill-paid and sometimes subject to a regimen which even at the time was thought fatuous and offensive. In a large office employing say thirty clerks, twenty would have been paid £100 a year at most, and some a lot less. As a commentator put it in 1888, “very few journeymen mechanics are paid so little as a guinea [£1.05p] per week, which is a very common salary for clerks who have long passed the junior stage.”[8] Small wonder that career guides written for parents thought it axiomatic that “no one will propose to make his son a clerk if he can possibly get anything better for him to do.” Commentators remarked how curious it was that clerks were so ill-paid and so despised when their work was so vital to the economy. The number of clerking jobs in England and Wales did nearly quadruple between 1871 and 1901, as Britain became not only the workshop of the world but its financial and mercantile heart as well. Behind the cosy routines of Pooter and the invented names like “Cleanands,” “Gylterson,” “Gillam Crowbillon”--if not “Perkupp”--one can hear faintly the hammer-pulse of the richest economy the world had ever seen.
We do not know Pooter’s salary exactly, but it is certainly well above the average for clerks. Clerks were notoriously ill-paid and sometimes subject to a regimen which even at the time was thought fatuous and offensive. In a large office employing say thirty clerks, twenty would have been paid £100 a year at most, and some a lot less. As a commentator put it in 1888, “very few journeymen mechanics are paid so little as a guinea [£1.05p] per week, which is a very common salary for clerks who have long passed the junior stage.”[8] Small wonder that career guides written for parents thought it axiomatic that “no one will propose to make his son a clerk if he can possibly get anything better for him to do.” Commentators remarked how curious it was that clerks were so ill-paid and so despised when their work was so vital to the economy. The number of clerking jobs in England and Wales did nearly quadruple between 1871 and 1901, as Britain became not only the workshop of the world but its financial and mercantile heart as well. Behind the cosy routines of Pooter and the invented names like “Cleanands,” “Gylterson,” “Gillam Crowbillon”--if not “Perkupp”--one can hear faintly the hammer-pulse of the richest economy the world had ever seen.
Despite the low pay, clerking had something desirable to offer: white-collar respectability. Many clerks had a proletarian background. They had secured a toehold, but no more than that, in the middle class. Insecure and marginalised, they were naturally inclined to obsequiousness, conventionality, timidity, loyalty, and political quietism. The very thought that he might join a trade union would have frightened Pooter out of his wits.
Despite the low pay, clerking had something desirable to offer: white-collar respectability. Many clerks had a proletarian background. They had secured a toehold, but no more than that, in the middle class. Insecure and marginalised, they were naturally inclined to obsequiousness, conventionality, timidity, loyalty, and political quietism. The very thought that he might join a trade union would have frightened Pooter out of his wits.
By the average standard of clerks, then, it is plain that Pooter is doing pretty well, especially after his promotional increase of £100, which he calls “enormous.” If he is then earning about £330 a year, Pooter is within the top few percent of salary-earners in 1890s England. It is true that correcting for inflation suggests this sum is “worth” around £30,000 in modern currency, but that in itself is a misleading conversion. What made a great difference is that Pooter paid very few taxes, either direct or indirect. In 1894 a young professional man writing as “Felicitas” revealed that he paid only £3 in income tax, on earnings of £350. He thought even that much was “odious” (407). It has been said that, to allow for tax savings, a Victorian salary, after correcting for inflation, should then be tripled to give an idea of its relative purchasing power today.
By the average standard of clerks, then, it is plain that Pooter is doing pretty well, especially after his promotional increase of £100, which he calls “enormous.” If he is then earning about £330 a year, Pooter is within the top few percent of salary-earners in 1890s England. It is true that correcting for inflation suggests this sum is “worth” around £30,000 in modern currency, but that in itself is a misleading conversion. What made a great difference is that Pooter paid very few taxes, either direct or indirect. In 1894 a young professional man writing as “Felicitas” revealed that he paid only £3 in income tax, on earnings of £350. He thought even that much was “odious” (407). It has been said that, to allow for tax savings, a Victorian salary, after correcting for inflation, should then be tripled to give an idea of its relative purchasing power today.
A more direct means of comparison is the article by G.S. Layard (given on this site), which discusses the lifestyle available to those with up to £200 a year. It seems a fairly straitened life compared to the one we see the Pooters enjoying. For example, Layard says a wife’s skill with the needle, in making or adapting the family’s clothes, must strongly affect their standard of living, but we never see Carrie so industriously engaged. (Indeed, one of the first reviewers seized on this very detail, objecting that in a Pooter-type household the wife would have mended their clothes, and never wasted money on a tailor.) Nor, of course, do they have dependent children.
A more direct means of comparison is the article by G.S. Layard (given on this site), which discusses the lifestyle available to those with up to £200 a year. It seems a fairly straitened life compared to the one we see the Pooters enjoying. For example, Layard says a wife’s skill with the needle, in making or adapting the family’s clothes, must strongly affect their standard of living, but we never see Carrie so industriously engaged. (Indeed, one of the first reviewers seized on this very detail, objecting that in a Pooter-type household the wife would have mended their clothes, and never wasted money on a tailor.) Nor, of course, do they have dependent children.
The Pooters are surely living above Layard’s maximum budget, and it is plain that having even say £50 more did make a lot of difference. Compared to most people of their class they live well--indeed, very well. To have a whole house at the disposal of two or three people was far beyond the scope of most London families. They eat and drink more or less what they like and can afford small luxuries. Pooter treats himself to the latest consumer gadgets, and Carrie always has a new costume for their annual holiday. There are plenty of small tradesmen close at hand eager to supply all the services that their economy had available, and the Pooters pay others to do practically everything they don’t want to do, or can’t do, for themselves. Pooter’s working hours, and the kind of work he is paid well to do, do not seem very arduous by modern standards.
The Pooters are surely living above Layard’s maximum budget, and it is plain that having even say £50 more did make a lot of difference. Compared to most people of their class they live well--indeed, very well. To have a whole house at the disposal of two or three people was far beyond the scope of most London families. They eat and drink more or less what they like and can afford small luxuries. Pooter treats himself to the latest consumer gadgets, and Carrie always has a new costume for their annual holiday. There are plenty of small tradesmen close at hand eager to supply all the services that their economy had available, and the Pooters pay others to do practically everything they don’t want to do, or can’t do, for themselves. Pooter’s working hours, and the kind of work he is paid well to do, do not seem very arduous by modern standards.
Nor, indeed, do Carrie’s housewifely duties. After all, she has a live-in, full-time “general” (all-purpose servant) as well as a daily charwoman. Tradesmen call at the door. Carrie has ample leisure--in the class to which she aspires that was important--but she appears to have no particular interests, not even paying “calls” which filled up so much time for married women in the classes above her. She goes shopping and visits her old school-friend Mrs. James at Sutton, in Surrey, a place then on the way to becoming a dormitory suburb for the comfortable middle classes. Mrs. James allows no fashionable trend, from large hats to spiritualism, to pass her by, and Carrie is slightly in awe of her, although both male Pooters find her overbearing and rude. Apart from such excursions, we gather that Carrie rarely leaves home unaccompanied. At one point Pooter has to return home to collect her for a social engagement, because she refuses to travel by herself in the early evening to meet him.
Nor, indeed, do Carrie’s housewifely duties. After all, she has a live-in, full-time “general” (all-purpose servant) as well as a daily charwoman. Tradesmen call at the door. Carrie has ample leisure--in the class to which she aspires that was important--but she appears to have no particular interests, not even paying “calls” which filled up so much time for married women in the classes above her. She goes shopping and visits her old school-friend Mrs. James at Sutton, in Surrey, a place then on the way to becoming a dormitory suburb for the comfortable middle classes. Mrs. James allows no fashionable trend, from large hats to spiritualism, to pass her by, and Carrie is slightly in awe of her, although both male Pooters find her overbearing and rude. Apart from such excursions, we gather that Carrie rarely leaves home unaccompanied. At one point Pooter has to return home to collect her for a social engagement, because she refuses to travel by herself in the early evening to meet him.
The Pooters in their leisure hours remind us how entirely dependent our ancestors were on self-generated domestic amusements. We hear of piano-playing and singing; having friends call in; playing dominoes, cards, or other parlour games; smoking and drinking downstairs in the breakfast parlour. Watching friends doing impersonations and imitations is surprisingly prominent. Reading is mostly confined to magazines and newspapers; books are rarely mentioned.
The Pooters in their leisure hours remind us how entirely dependent our ancestors were on self-generated domestic amusements. We hear of piano-playing and singing; having friends call in; playing dominoes, cards, or other parlour games; smoking and drinking downstairs in the breakfast parlour. Watching friends doing impersonations and imitations is surprisingly prominent. Reading is mostly confined to magazines and newspapers; books are rarely mentioned.
Yet it is not all cosy comfort. A striking feature of the Pooters’ lives is that they are mildly but constantly anxious. It is an anxiety mostly social and class-based, but it is also economic. Of course, the anxiety is touched up for comic effect, but there is no mistaking the more serious tone that occasionally intrudes. We are reminded of the nagging fear of the white-collar worker over losing his “berth” when Mr Perkupp, the boss, calls Pooter to his office. Pooter has no reason to be apprehensive, but “I must confess that my heart commenced to beat and I had most serious misgivings.”
Yet it is not all cosy comfort. A striking feature of the Pooters’ lives is that they are mildly but constantly anxious. It is an anxiety mostly social and class-based, but it is also economic. Of course, the anxiety is touched up for comic effect, but there is no mistaking the more serious tone that occasionally intrudes. We are reminded of the nagging fear of the white-collar worker over losing his “berth” when Mr Perkupp, the boss, calls Pooter to his office. Pooter has no reason to be apprehensive, but “I must confess that my heart commenced to beat and I had most serious misgivings.”
Mr. Perkupp was in his room writing, and he said: “Take a seat, Mr. Pooter, I shall not be moment.”
Mr. Perkupp was in his room writing, and he said: “Take a seat, Mr. Pooter, I shall not be moment.”
I replied: “No, thank you, sir; I’ll stand.”
I replied: “No, thank you, sir; I’ll stand.”
I watched the clock on the mantelpiece, and I was waiting quite twenty minutes; but it seemed hours. Mr. Perkupp at last got up himself [9 Feb 89. Ch.14].
I watched the clock on the mantelpiece, and I was waiting quite twenty minutes; but it seemed hours. Mr. Perkupp at last got up himself [9 Feb 89. Ch.14].
This is a muted theme in the Diary--it was hardly a comic matter--but Pooter’s anxieties do gain great point when read against other fiction about clerks, such as the anonymous Story of a London Clerk (1896), whose hero Osmond Ormesby braces himself “to sell his labour at almost any price, in almost any market.” Later, he explains how he lives on twelve shillings a week working for a lawyer. At all costs he has to hang on to his respectable appearance, and that involves, among other indignities, wearing dirt-proof rubber collars to his shirts. This drearily realistic documentary fiction helps us appreciate both Pooter’s nervousness and his more usual mood of preening self-satisfaction.
This is a muted theme in the Diary--it was hardly a comic matter--but Pooter’s anxieties do gain great point when read against other fiction about clerks, such as the anonymous Story of a London Clerk (1896), whose hero Osmond Ormesby braces himself “to sell his labour at almost any price, in almost any market.” Later, he explains how he lives on twelve shillings a week working for a lawyer. At all costs he has to hang on to his respectable appearance, and that involves, among other indignities, wearing dirt-proof rubber collars to his shirts. This drearily realistic documentary fiction helps us appreciate both Pooter’s nervousness and his more usual mood of preening self-satisfaction.
Another form of anxiety on display is much mocked. This is the intense class consciousness of Pooter and his wife. For example, they worry constantly about wearing the right clothes, and are mortified when they, or their friends, wear the wrong clothes for the occasion. Dress was one of the supreme signifiers of class and status at this time, and every Victorian learned to decode its symbolic language. A modern reader is hardly likely to register the fact that Cummings turns up to the party in an invented “half dress” consisting of a frock coat and a white tie, but the combination would have made the first readers guffaw. Similarly, the detail about Carrie’s “little cloth cricket-cap,” that she prefers to a bonnet, is probably meant to imply vulgarity.
Another form of anxiety on display is much mocked. This is the intense class consciousness of Pooter and his wife. For example, they worry constantly about wearing the right clothes, and are mortified when they, or their friends, wear the wrong clothes for the occasion. Dress was one of the supreme signifiers of class and status at this time, and every Victorian learned to decode its symbolic language. A modern reader is hardly likely to register the fact that Cummings turns up to the party in an invented “half dress” consisting of a frock coat and a white tie, but the combination would have made the first readers guffaw. Similarly, the detail about Carrie’s “little cloth cricket-cap,” that she prefers to a bonnet, is probably meant to imply vulgarity.
Clothes were expensive to buy and keep presentable, so they were likely to register cruelly the first signs that one was slipping down the economic ladder. After the Sunday dinner at Finsworth’s, when the dog licks the polish off Pooter’s boots, we hear that “the walk home was remarkable only for the fact that several fools giggled at the unpolished state of my boots. Polished them myself when I got home.” [28 Apr 89. Ch.19] Again, the incident is touched up for comic effect, but nevertheless it is a reminder that this was a world of stronger social policing than ours. It was a world where you might be jeered at by street loungers if your apparent status and your clothes were giving out contradictory signals.
Clothes were expensive to buy and keep presentable, so they were likely to register cruelly the first signs that one was slipping down the economic ladder. After the Sunday dinner at Finsworth’s, when the dog licks the polish off Pooter’s boots, we hear that “the walk home was remarkable only for the fact that several fools giggled at the unpolished state of my boots. Polished them myself when I got home.” [28 Apr 89. Ch.19] Again, the incident is touched up for comic effect, but nevertheless it is a reminder that this was a world of stronger social policing than ours. It was a world where you might be jeered at by street loungers if your apparent status and your clothes were giving out contradictory signals.
The Pooters’ social anxiety is exacerbated by their realisation that the ground is shifting under their feet. The mid-Victorian certainties under which they were raised are starting to break up, and that makes them neurotically sensitive about their social position. Bettering themselves means, above all, getting other people to see them as “gentlefolk.” At this time, the notion of what constituted a gentleman or a lady was just starting to lose its definition as a class/income delineator, in which the most important element was either not needing to work, or working (in the case of a man) at one of the jobs traditionally accepted as gentlemanly: law, medicine, the Church, the army, certain kinds of artistic activity, the higher levels of business. Again and again we see Pooter drawing the cloak of gentleman protectively around him; yet the truth, of which he himself is uneasily aware, is that a clerk simply was not, and could not be, a gentleman in the sense still prevailing. The theme is stated early, in the first chapter, when the tradesman Borset claims not to know any clerks who are gentlemen. Borset is drunk, as it happens, but he is right. The conversion had only just started of the term “gentleman” into a vague moral descriptor: that is, merely any respectable middle-class person, and eventually little but a label on a public lavatory.
The Pooters’ social anxiety is exacerbated by their realisation that the ground is shifting under their feet. The mid-Victorian certainties under which they were raised are starting to break up, and that makes them neurotically sensitive about their social position. Bettering themselves means, above all, getting other people to see them as “gentlefolk.” At this time, the notion of what constituted a gentleman or a lady was just starting to lose its definition as a class/income delineator, in which the most important element was either not needing to work, or working (in the case of a man) at one of the jobs traditionally accepted as gentlemanly: law, medicine, the Church, the army, certain kinds of artistic activity, the higher levels of business. Again and again we see Pooter drawing the cloak of gentleman protectively around him; yet the truth, of which he himself is uneasily aware, is that a clerk simply was not, and could not be, a gentleman in the sense still prevailing. The theme is stated early, in the first chapter, when the tradesman Borset claims not to know any clerks who are gentlemen. Borset is drunk, as it happens, but he is right. The conversion had only just started of the term “gentleman” into a vague moral descriptor: that is, merely any respectable middle-class person, and eventually little but a label on a public lavatory.
The most frightening and subversive single line in the Diary (from Pooter’s perspective) is the “loud, coarse laugh” of the ironmonger, Farmerson, which is his response when Pooter is astonished to see him at the Mansion House ball: “I like that--if you, why not me?” Pooter can only respond “Certainly” but wishes “I could have thought of something better to say.” [7 May 88. Ch.12] But there is nothing he can say. A prosperous retail ironmonger could well afford, in every sense, to patronise a mid-level clerk. It is a painful realisation for the likes of Pooter, and betokened the further disruptions to the traditional class structure that lay in wait in the next century.
Perhaps these various anxieties are what make the Pooters cling so closely together. “I spent the evening quietly with Carrie, of whose company I never tire.” [2 Nov. Ch. 7] Such is the keynote of the Pooter marriage. Among the aspirant middle orders in the urban England of the 1880s, the ideal of the companionate marriage had been thoroughly internalised. Both Pooters adhere to it. Both take it for granted that, apart from very occasional Sunday outings with his male friends, Pooter will be found neither at the pub nor in his club, the male retreats of the classes below and above him. He will spend all his leisure at home with his wife.
If the Pooters are a partnership, as the current ideology required, then it is an unequal one. Pooter’s home is a thoroughly gendered space, his wife’s domain, and he regularly defers to her. Almost his only outlet for manful assertion is to patronise his wife secretly in his diary. He confides to it that some of her suggestions about what to put in an important letter are “absolutely idiotic,” [13 May. Ch. 21] and when they dine with the thrillingly unorthodox Hardfur Huttle, for instance, he records how “Carrie was about to say something; but she was interrupted, for which I was rather pleased, for she is not clever at argument.” [10 May 1889. Ch. 20]
But we, the readers, see that she is quite clever enough to snub her husband when she wishes to. In fact Carrie Pooter strikes us as more empowered than most Victorian wives are supposed to have been. It is true that she has no income, no career and no vote. If Mr. Pooter had suddenly taken it into his head to keep a mistress, for example, or to sexually abuse her, she could not have divorced him on those grounds alone. For anything short of severe physical violence she was expected to stick it out at home. (Marital rape, adultery, domestic imprisonment, and moderate chastisement did not count as cruelty.) If Carrie had left because Pooter would not maintain her, for instance, she would have put herself outside the protection of the law.
Yet we see how these hard facts have remarkably little effect on her self-image or behaviour. She does not fit either of the stereotypes traditionally associated with Victorian wives. She is neither an “Angel in the House” of extraordinary moral virtue, nor is she a domestic slave under marital control. We see her arguing vigorously with her husband, and even walking out on him for more than a week. Pooter unconsciously reveals just how irritating she finds him in private, and she does not scruple to disparage him in public, as when she informs his friends that “he tells me his stupid dreams every morning nearly.” [29 April. Ch.19] Only once does the meek Pooter show real spirit: this comes when he finally puts his foot down over the séances, after which Mrs James makes some insulting remark in an undertone:
I said: “Hush, madam. I am master of this house--please understand that.”
Mrs. James made an observation which I sincerely hope I was mistaken in. I was in such a rage I could not quite catch what she said. But if I thought she said what it sounded like, she should never enter the house again. [4 Jun 89. Ch.22]
What she has muttered, clearly, is something about who really wears the trousers at The Laurels. When, provoked beyond endurance at this sally, he turns on her like a cornered rat--or mouse--it is hard, as usual, to know whether we are expected to snigger or smile sympathetically.
The unwelcome arrival home of Lupin Pooter, a sprig of twenty, introduces more domestic comedy. He is instantly recognizable as the forerunner of a modern youth still living fretfully under the parental roof. He treats the house as a hotel, staying in bed all morning and then going out with friends at eleven o’clock. He is insouciant about money and drinks and smokes too much. His taste in music, entertainment and friends seem specially designed to irritate. Lupin despises Pooter’s fashion sense and, dressing sharply himself, does not hesitate to say so.
But he has many saving graces. He is quick-witted, enterprising and warm-hearted and, despite his father’s gloomy predictions, is soon spotted by his employer as a young man in a hurry. Relations between father and son, which are marked by an easy, mocking familiarity on Lupin’s part, are presented attractively:
In the exuberance of his spirits he hit his hat with his stick, gave a loud war “Whoo-oop,” jumped over a chair, and took the liberty of rumpling my hair all over my forehead, and bounced out of the room, giving me no chance of reminding him of his age and the respect which was due to his parent. [Entry of 16 May 1889. Ch. 21]
It is plain that no such scene as this ever took place at George Grossmith’s tightly-run home in Dorset Square. But then, his eldest son was only fourteen when Lupin sauntered into the pages of Punch.
In 1968 the novelist Colin McInnes, in an article entitled “Groovy Lupin,” presented him as a Sixties teenager, eighty years before his time. But this view of Lupin as a proto-hippie is ridiculous. Lupin is no rebel, other than being impatient with his father’s stuffiness and humble obedience. No, Lupin is a startlingly recognisable precursor of a very different type: the yuppie. His ambitions circle around the idea of what he calls “good old biz,” and his most obvious descendants are the young City brokers of a century later. Can we doubt that today’s Lupin would be hunched over a screen, making in a single deal most of his father’s annual salary? The full extent of Lupin’s rebellion is merely to swap Holloway for an expensive Bayswater apartment, to get a job in a progressive financial house, and to marry Murray Posh’s rich sister. Certainly no hint of McInnes’s “groovy Lupin” is visible as he raps out instructions to his parents to be prompt at his first dinner party: “Eight o’clock sharp. No one else.” [Entry of 3 July 1889. Ch.23] The occasion is, naturally, “full dress.”
When another decade or so has passed, Lupin and his tall, plain, older wife with her annoying laugh will make a perfect Edwardian nouveau riche couple. With the benefit of hindsight we can predict life is likely to be good for Lupin Pooter. He will be too old for the First World War, though he may lose a son of his own in it, and he will probably die just after the start of the Second. He will surely make good money in the Edwardian boom years; and he is likely, since he will be in his fifties by that time, to do even better in the free-spending 1920s. Indeed, by that date he may well have become one of those “hard-faced men,” cited by John Maynard Keynes, who looked as if they had done very well out of the War. The poet John Betjeman memorialised him in his elegiac poem “Middlesex”:
Taverns for the bona fide,
Cockney singers, cockney shooters,
Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters,
Long in Kensal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.[9]
[1] Ivan Butler (1992) wrote a witty and ingenious essay making a “case” for “Charles the Ripper.” He made much of the fact that the “sinister” gap in the entries caused by the pages of the Diary having been accidentally “burnt” (or so Pooter claimed!) do in fact encompass the dates of the first four murders, which occurred between Friday 31 August and Sunday 30 September 1888.
[2] See, in particular, the work by A. James Hammerton and John Tosh listed in the bibliography.
[3] Gissing (1927), 319. First published 1887. The areas mentioned in the closing sentence were East End slums.
[4] Inwood (1998), 520; Argyll, in Booth (1902-4), 250.
[5] Quoted in Early (1996), 329, but no source is given.
[6] Cases have been made for houses at 529 Holloway Road or else at 1 Pemberton Gardens, Holloway, which does back on to railway lines, but neither frontage matches Weedon’s drawing very closely. See Carr (1954), Weinreb & Hibbert (1983), 388; West (1992), 67; Glinert (2000), 276-7.
[7] Flanders (2003), 230 says that 5pm “was the same time that Mr Pooter had his dinner on his return from the City.” This is a slip, as Pooter arrives home at least an hour later than that and the meal he has is always “tea.” He leaves his office to dine at 1:30.
[8] Roberts (1888), 464. He adds that “the ordinary clerk has very few chances of earning an income of £150 or £200 per annum.” It should be borne in mind that even in 1910 barely one in twenty of British families had an income above £160 a year.
[9] “Middlesex,” in Betjeman (1954). Another of Betjeman’s poems, “Thoughts on the Diary of a Nobody” (1955), is about the Pooters’ Sunday visit to Watney Lodge.
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