Today is the birthday of Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights, which seems to be a rather polarizing book. One person on Facebook who was reading it asked, “Does it ever move beyond unhappy people causing misery to themselves and others?” Someone else said, “Anyone who says they love Wuthering Heights is lying to sound smart.” But yet another reader said, “The prose just wraps me up and sweeps me away and I can’t help but love it. My relationship with that book is such a mess.”

I’m not lying when I say that I liked the story, even though I found almost all of the characters unsympathetic and sadly unlikeable, especially Heathcliff and Cathy. I’m not sure what that opinion says about me as a reader or as a person, but nevertheless I recommend you form your own opinion by reading Wuthering Heights. If you get fifty pages in and you hate it, I give you permission to quit and go read Jan Karon or P.G. Wodehouse to get the taste out of your palate. (Or you could try Diary of a Nobody. See below.)

Allan Wesley Eckert (not born on this date), author of Incident at Hawk’s Hill, a Newbery Honor book in 1972, “spent much of his youth hitchhiking around the country, living off the land and learning about wildlife from direct observation.” He was born in 1931, so this hitchhiking would have taken place in the late forties/early fifties. I wonder what his family thought about his choice to wander about and live off the land. This was before the era of the hippies and free-spirited sixties peaceniks. He wrote a lot of books. I wonder if he wrote one about his youthful experiences hitchhiking about the country.

I read the first couple of chapters of Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, a book I picked up while Engineer Husband and I were in Oxford. It’s a fictionalized diary of an ordinary man in the late nineteenth century who lives in a small house outside the City (London?) with his wife Carrie. The man’s name is Charles Pooter, and he’s a perfectly ordinary little man who takes himself quite seriously, which makes the book quite funny. The humor is dry and unassuming, but definite. For example, it begins:

“Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see—because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’—why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.”

CHARLES POOTER
The Laurels
Brickfield Terrace
Holloway

George Grossmith went on to become a famous comic actor, starring in many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous operas: as The Sorcerer, The First Lord in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ko-Ko in The Mikado, Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore, Bunthorne in Patience, and Jack Point in The Yeoman of the Guard. George’s brother, Weedon, illustrated Diary of a Nobody, and the illustrations are a great part of the charm of the book. I’m looking forward to savoring it over a period of several days.

This post is probably the first time that Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and Cathy and George Grossmith’s Mr. Pooter have been referenced in the same piece of writing, but perhaps there will be connections as I continue reading Diary of a Nobody.