Дневник никого: Комический роман братьев Гроссмит

1892 comic novel by George and Weeden Grossmith

The Diary of a Nobody is an English comic novel written by the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith, with illustrations by the latter. It originated as an intermittent serial in Punch magazine in 1888–89 and first appeared in book form, with extended text and added illustrations, in 1892. The Diary records the daily events in the lives of a London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances over a period of 15 months. Before their collaboration on the Diary, the brothers each pursued successful careers on the stage. George originated nine of the principal comedian roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operas over 12 years from 1877 to 1889. He also established a national reputation as a piano sketch entertainer and wrote a large number of songs and comic pieces. Before embarking on his stage career, Weedon had worked as an artist and illustrator. The Diary was the brothers' only mature collaboration. Most of its humour derives from Charles Pooter's unconscious and unwarranted sense of his own importance, and the frequency with which this delusion is punctured by gaffes and minor social humiliations. In an era of rising expectations within the lower middle classes, the daily routines and modest ambitions described in the Diary were instantly recognised by its contemporary readers, and provided later generations with a glimpse of the past that it became fashionable to imitate. Although its initial public reception was muted, the Diary came to be recognised by critics as a classic work of humour, and it has never been out of print. It helped to establish a genre of humorous popular fiction based on lower or lower middle class aspirations, and was the forerunner of numerous fictitious diary novels in the later 20th century. The Diary has been the subject of several stage and screen adaptations, including Ken Russell's "silent film" treatment of 1964, a four part TV film scripted by Andrew Davies in 2007, and a widely praised stage version in 2011, in which an all male cast of three played all the parts.

The Diary of a Nobody was the work of George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith, the sons of a court reporter and part time stage entertainer, also named George. The younger George followed his father, first as a reporter and later on the stage; the 7 years younger Weedon studied at the West London School of Art and had some success as a portrait painter before becoming a comic actor. By 1877 the younger George Grossmith had established himself as a comic piano sketch entertainer in provincial institutes and literary societies. In that year he was seen by Arthur Sullivan and, separately, by W. S. Gilbert, in performances of their one act comic opera Trial by Jury. Impressed, they engaged him to play the comic lead in their new, full length work, The Sorcerer. Thereafter, Grossmith created the leading comic role in each of Gilbert and Sullivan's long running comic operas until The Yeomen of the Guard, which closed in 1889. writing numerous operettas, around 100 piano sketches, some 600 songs and short piano pieces, and three books. For Punch magazine in 1884 he provided a series of short sketches based on his experiences as a court reporter at Bow Street Magistrates' Court. suggests that many of the events depicted in it were drawn from the brothers' own home experiences, and that Weedon, "something of a scapegrace compared with his perfectionist brother", was the model for Lupin. The diary entry dates are several weeks behind the dates on which they appear in Punch. The Punch serialisation ended in May 1889 with the diary entry for 21 March, which records the Pooters and their friends celebrating the minor triumph of Lupin's appointment as a clerk at Perkupp's. That was the intended end of the diary; however, when the writers were preparing the manuscript for publication as a book, they added a further four months' entries to the text, and included 26 illustrations by Weedon Grossmith. The writer Robert McCrum, in a personal list of "The 100 greatest novels of all time" published in The Observer newspaper, listed the Diary at number 35.

The Punch serialisation attracted little critical comment; The Athenaeums literary critic thought the series "may have escaped unnoticed amid better jokes". However, apart from a warmly approving report in The Saturday Review, the book's initial critical reception was lukewarm. The Reviews critic thought the book "admirable, and in some of its touches [it] goes close to genius", with a natural and irresistible appeal: "The Diary has amused us from cover to cover". This contrasted with the negative judgement of The Athenaeum, which opined that "the book has no merit to compensate for its hopeless vulgarity, not even that of being amusing". It questioned the tastefulness of jokes aimed almost exclusively at the poverty of underpaid city clerks, and concluded: "Besides, it is all so dull". The Speakers critic thought the book "a study in vulgarity", while The New York Times, reviewing the first American edition, found the work largely incomprehensible: "There is that kind of quiet, commonplace, everyday joking in it which we are to suppose is highly satisfactory to our cousins across the water  Our way of manufacturing fun is different". Although details of sales figures are not given, Arrowsmiths later acknowledged that the early editions of the book did not have a wide public impact.

By 1910 the Diary was beginning to achieve a reputation in London's literary and political circles. In his essay "On People in Books", published earlier that year, the writer and humourist Hilaire Belloc hailed the Diary as "one of the half dozen immortal achievements of our time  a glory for us all". Among others who recorded their appreciation of the work were Lord Rosebery, the former prime minister, who told Arrowsmiths that he thought he had "purchased and given away more copies than any living man  I regard any bedroom I occupy as unfurnished without a copy of it". Another essayist cum politician who added his tribute was Augustine Birrell, who in 1910 occupied the cabinet post of Chief Secretary for Ireland. Birrell wrote that he ranked Charles Pooter alongside Don Quixote as a comic literary figure, and added a note of personal pride that one of the characters in the book—"an illiterate charwoman, it is true"—carried his name. Arrowsmiths printed these appreciations as prefaces in the 1910 and subsequent issues. The 1910 edition proved immediately popular with the reading public, and was followed by numerous reprintings. refn|The 1919 edition lists nine reprintings between the third edition (1910) and the fourth in 1919. Peter Morton has noted that "the history of the early book editions of the Diary is tangled, due to the unwillingness of the publisher to distinguish between an edition and an impression". This has created inconsistencies in later edition numbering. In its review of the book's fourth edition, published in 1919, The Bookman observed that the book was now a firm favourite with the public. "It has had many imitators  but not one of them has rivalled the original, and they have all faded away". The reviewer recommended the book's "quaint drollery, its whimsical satire and delightfully quiet irony". In Canada, Queen's Quarterly magazine's sympathetic reception of the book contrasted with that of The New York Times nearly 30 years previously. It praises the understated but lovable self portrait of Pooter, and adds that "It is not till the second or third reading—and you are bound to reread it—that the really consummate art of this artless book becomes apparent". The literary critic D. B. Wyndham Lewis summarised the Pooters as "warm, living, breathing, futile, half baked, incredibly alive and endearing boneheads".

The novelist Evelyn Waugh had been familiar with the Diary since his childhood. It was a great favourite of his parents—Arthur Waugh used to read passages aloud to his family, and Evelyn's biographer Selina Hastings has drawn attention to the distinctly Pooterish elements in the Waugh household. Evelyn Waugh was initially contemptuous of the book, but grew to admire it, to the extent of writing in his 1930 essay "One Way to Immortality" that it was "the funniest book in the world". He added: "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". Morton posits that several of the leading characters in Waugh's early novels, though socially far removed from the Pooters, share the bafflement of Charles and Carrie with the problems of a changing world. In his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, Waugh has Lady Marchmain comforting her family by reading aloud from the Diary "with her beautiful voice and great humour of expression". Morton suggests that one of the work's attractions to Waugh was his personal identification with Lupin, and the way in which the disapproved son (as Waugh saw himself) repeatedly manages to turn adverse circumstances to his ultimate advantage. In a 1943 essay, George Orwell considered the book an accurate account of English life in the 1880s. In describing Pooter he revived the Don Quixote analogy but saw this English equivalent as a sentimentalised version of the original, one who "constantly suffers disasters brought upon him by his own folly". In the years after the Second World War the book's stock remained high; Osbert Lancaster deemed it "a great work of art", and similar enthusiasm was expressed by a new generation of writers and social historians. Gillian Tindall, writing in 1970, thought the Diary "the best comic novel in the language", and lauded Pooter as "the presiding shade" of his era. This accolade was echoed a further generation on by A. N. Wilson, who wrote in his study of the Victorian era: "Who is to say that Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley are more typical of the [1890s] than the lower middle class Charles and Carrie Pooter?" Wilson also observed the extent to which the Pooters had become recognised as "arbiters of the greatest good taste", as the late 20th century English middle classes sought to acquire or preserve authentic Victorian features in their carefully crafted "period" homes. A Spectator article of 2008 remarks on how such houses as "The Laurels", the humble habitats of 1890s City clerks, had by the 21st century become desirable £1 million plus homes in what it terms "banker land".

Peter Bailey, in his study "White Collars, Gray Lives" (1999), traces the beginnings of literary interest in the lower middle classes to the "disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers" that faced Victorian writers in the last quarter of the 19th century. The Grossmiths' Diary was a typical satire of its time; it probed the lower middle class lives of the Pooters and poked fun at their pretensions and petty concerns. Tony Joseph calls the Diary "a sharp analysis of social insecurity". However, the quarter century following the publication of The Diary of a Nobody saw a tendency to mix mockery with sympathy, even approval. In the works of writers such as George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and E. M. Forster, characters emerged who, despite the recognisably Pooterish aspects of their lives, were by no means entirely absurd. Bennett and Wells could poke fun at figures such as "Denry Machin", "Mr Polly" or "Mr Lewisham", while at the same time celebrating their fortitude, energy and determination to look for better things. In cases such as these, writes Bailey, "disdain could change to admiration and national self identification, as the Little Man  was transposed into Everyman, a model of cheerful resilience in times of crisis." During the past century, the fictitious diary has developed as an accepted means of comedic expression; the original has, says Morton, "been fertile ground which has germinated many seeds". The diary genre became particularly popular in the late 20th century. In 1978–81 Christopher Matthew produced three volumes of diaries recording the daily life of "Simon Crisp", a bachelor would be man about town of the era. The title of the first, The Diary of a Somebody, is a direct reference to the Grossmith original. Reviewing this volume in The Spectator, Benny Green points out several parallels with the original, in both character and event. Matthew's book, says Green, is amusing, but the Grossmiths' book is superior; it is "affecting as well as comical, in a way that the Matthew pastiche is not". In 1982 came the first appearance of Sue Townsend's teenage creation, Adrian Mole, whose passage into young manhood and early middle age is charted in a long series of diaries. The more middle aged he becomes, says Morton, the more he resembles Pooter. Keith Waterhouse's Mrs Pooter's Diary of 1983 is an adaptation of the Grossmith original that shifts the narrative voice to Carrie Pooter. In 1996 Helen Fielding used the imaginary diary format for Bridget Jones's Diary, which records the daily paraphernalia of a single woman's life. The New York Times critic wrote that it "captures neatly the way modern women teeter between 'I am woman' independence and a pathetic girlie desire to be all things to all men." This diary began as a weekly column in The Independent. In the 1990s the satirical magazine Private Eye lampooned John Major, British prime minister 1990–97, in "The Secret Diary of John Major aged 473/4", a hybrid of the Adrian Mole diaries with The Diary of a Nobody, which made much fun of Major's lower middle class origins. The social historian James Hammerton defines "Pooterism" as "the dependent weakness and inflated social pretension of white collar workers, constructed in the workplace but expressed just as powerfully at home". Jon Wilde of The Guardian observes this characteristic in a number of British TV comedy creations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Captain Mainwaring, Victor Meldrew, and Peep Shows Mark Corrigan are all examples of characters "whose blinkered view of themselves is forever in sharp contrast to how they are perceived by the world". Hammerton remarks that the Grossmiths "would surely appreciate the irony in seeing features of the lower middle class existence they mocked so mercilessly becoming the more universal model for 20th century family life". Bailey remarks on how the poet John Betjeman presented the Pooters "not as objects of ridicule but of envy, snug and secure in their suburban retreat".

In September 1954 a stage version of the Diary, by Basil Dean and Richard Blake, was presented at London's Arts Theatre with a cast that included George Benson and Dulcie Gray as the Pooters and Leslie Phillips as Lupin. Anthony Hartley, writing in The Spectator, classed this production as "fair to middling", with sympathetic performances from the principals: "[I]t is a precondition of this kind of play that everybody concerned should have a heart of gold: only in the case of Mr. Pooter's employer, Mr. Perkupp, do we actually hear the metal chinking." In 1986 Waterhouse presented an adaptation of his "Mrs Pooter" text at the Garrick Theatre, with Judi Dench and Michael Williams. This version was revived in 1993 at the Greenwich Theatre in a production by Matthew Francis. Clive Swift and Patricia Routledge played Charles and Carrie, in what Paul Taylor in The Independent described as "essentially a two hander  in which all the other folk (including Lupin Pooter, the uppish, worrying son) are either imagined characters or, at times, impersonated by the Pooters". In March 2011 the Diary was the subject of an even less orthodox production at the Royal & Derngate Theatre, Northampton. Adapted by Hugh Osborne, with an all male cast led by Robert Daws, this supposes that Pooter has arranged for his diaries to be performed by amateur actors. Lyn Gardner in The Guardian found it "a show of some charm – though one that, like Pooter himself, does not quite have the credentials to be quite so pleased with itself". In 2014 a production of the Diary was staged in London by Rough Haired Pointer at the White Bear Theatre and later transferred to the King's Head Theatre. This production was revived at the King's Head in 2017; Time Out said of it: "It captures the original’s sharp subtext, frivolous wit and heavy irony, while also being very, very silly". The first adaptation for screen was Ken Russell's short (40 minute) film for the BBC film unit in 1964. Russell shot this in the style of the silent films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, with the text narrated in a voice over. The BBC screened two subsequent adaptations: in 1979 a version dramatised by Basil Boothroyd, and in 2007 a four part dramatisation by Andrew Davies, directed by Susanna White and first shown on BBC Four as part of the channel's Edwardian season. The Guardians critic wrote of the latter that Hugh Bonneville was "immaculate as the ignored kerfuffler [Pooter]." BBC Radio 4 has broadcast several dramatisations of the Diary. These include Stephen Tompkinson and Annette Badland in a 2004 adaptation by Kelvin Segger, and Johnny Vegas and Katherine Parkinson in Andrew Lynch's 2012 adaptation. In May 1990, the BBC World Service broadcast a radio version of the 1986 Keith Waterhouse adaptation, starring Judi Dench and Michael Williams; this production was later re broadcast on 24 December 1991 on BBC Radio 4.