George Grossmith

English · 1847 to 1912

Born on December 9, 1847, in Islington, London, George Grossmith was the elder son of a man of the same name who served as chief reporter for The Times at the Bow Street Magistrates' Court and supplemented that work with public lectures and comic entertainments. The boy followed his father into the press box, reporting from Bow Street through the 1860s and writing humorous pieces for periodicals, while playing piano sketches and songs for amateur audiences in his spare hours. Arthur Sullivan, who had watched him in charity performances of Trial by Jury, invited him in 1877 to create the role of John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer. Despite private misgivings about the professional stage, Grossmith accepted, and over the next twelve years he originated nine of the principal comic baritone parts in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, among them Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), Reginald Bunthorne in Patience (1881), the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe (1882), and Ko-Ko in The Mikado (1885). With his younger brother Weedon, an actor and illustrator, he expanded a run of columns first printed in Punch into The Diary of a Nobody (1892), the journal of the anxious, self-important clerk Charles Pooter, which quietly outlasted nearly all the operas that made his name. He left D'Oyly Carte in 1889 to tour as a solo entertainer across Britain, Ireland, and North America, performing his own songs and drawing-room sketches. He was famously jittery on opening nights. After his wife Emmeline died in 1905, he fell into a deep depression. He died on March 1, 1912, at his home in Folkestone, Kent, aged sixty-four.