Diary of a Nobody - Softcover

Grossmith, George; Goldsmith, Weedon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1481942247 ISBN 13: 9781481942249

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Synopsis

Diary of a Nobody is near perfect as a piece of English comedy, its humor gentle and subtle, its depiction of character, class, time and location flawless. It fixes forever the late-Victorian world of the respectable Lower Middle Class, populated by clerks, petty merchants and tradesmen, observing it with both objectivity and affection. Though superficially simple, the construction of the narrative is complex in the extreme, with comic situations often being built up over a long period, and with clues carefully planted in earlier sections, only to come to fruition later. It is particularly impressive how the main characters - Pooter himself, his long-suffering and often silly but supportive wife Carrie and his exasperating son Lupin - emerge as rounded characters from apparently simple diary entries and achieve a realism and familiarity as great as any in more serious literature.

About this title

Review:

Sensational... It's a rare ability to render an audience helpless with laughter and crying with emotion at the same moment. Hugh Osborne's new adaptation of the Victorian comic classic The Diary of a Nobody has this ability in spades. --whatsonstage.com

Perkily inventive, highly pleasing, gloriously funny... while it shows clear signs of indebtedness to the skittish, playful aesthetic of that estimable long-runner The 39 Steps, Osborne's adaptation still possesses heaps of its own irreverent originality. --Telegraph

About the Author:

George Grossmith (1847 –1912) was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines. Grossmith is best remembered for two aspects of his career. First, he created a series of nine memorable characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado. Second, he wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel Diary of a Nobody. Grossmith was also famous in his day for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs, both before and after his Gilbert and Sullivan days, becoming the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s. Some of his comic songs endure today, including "See Me Dance the Polka". He continued to perform into the first decade of the 20th century. His son, George Grossmith, Jr., became a famous actor, playwright and producer of Edwardian musical comedies.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1481942247
• ISBN 13: 9781481942249
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 102