George and Weedon Grossmith

 

When it comes to The Diary of a Nobody, all I can say is: if it's good enough for Evelyn Waugh -- and evidently it was -- then it's good enough for me. This novel by the Grossmith brothers, George and Weedon, is everything a playful book should be: mischievous, comical, enlightening. But more than that: Diary of a Nobody is very well conceived: it's perfectly written, with a rhythmic style very much of its time. No surprise that Three Men in a Boat, another work of similar scope and ambition, was published within a year of Nobody. 

What I enjoyed most about Nobody -- beside is humor and wit -- was the question it seems to pose just before the surface: which is whether the Victorian fashion for published diaries had to be limited to those of social elites. Here is an upper middle class family -- with the habits and preferences to suit. And yet, in the predictability of their daily routine, in the formulaic nature of their aspirations, there is an epic quality. The Grossmith brothers have done two things very well: first, they have endowed middle class life with humor and levity, without demeaning that life; and second, they have positioned middle class tropes and hopes as items worthy of publication. 

Diary of a Nobody is, of course, just that: but that seems to be exactly the point. This nobody -- this Mr Pooter -- is endlessly interesting and comical and human. Which is the moral, perhaps: humanity can be comical and serious at the same time. Embracing these in equal measures results in the sort of illumination you might otherwise expect from a 'somebody.'