This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us a lot about fact. Published 1892, The Diary of a Nobody is about London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances. Most of all, it's about upwardly mobile lower middle class life in London at around the time of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the Grossmiths showed a side of life and a kind of comedy those other writers wouldn't touch. That's what made Diary of a Nobody a huge bestseller.

The Grossmith brothers were cultural barometers of their day. George Grossmith was the most famous character actor in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, and a stand-up comic, sketch writer, performer and artist. He wrote hit 18 comic opera, 600 songs, and endless short sketches. Weedon Grossmith (where is that name now?) was also a successful artist, writer, performer and actor.

In this episode we'll see a side of Victorian London we haven't delved into until now. Sophie and Jonty feel their oats as upwardly mobile creatives, or Upper Middle Bogans as we're called in Australia. And if anyone listening thinks that SLOB has turned SNOB, that's because The Diary of a Nobody was an unprecedentedly playful and loving look at the domestic anxieties, commuter travel, office politics and food and drink of a highly specific slice of class society in Victorian Britain.

This episode reveals what isn’t being talked about in the great books of the period. Sophie and Jonty ask why the Grossmith Brothers used the diary form to write their satire, and how this book in the inheritor of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell's voices. We'll learn how this diary shows the faultlines, tensions and unresolved issues about Victorian masculinity, making Diary of a Nobody a mini masterpiece.

Books mentioned in this episode:

George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; The Picture of Dorian Gray

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

HG Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, Love and Mr. Lewisham

George Gissing, New Grub Street

Bill Watterman, Calvin and Hobbes

Jim Davis, Garfield

John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera

George Orwell, Keep the Aspisistra Flying

Herman Melville, Bartlby the Scrivener

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Hanif Kureshi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Brown”

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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Not if it was the summer holiday that Jonty's family went on to Menorca when a stomach bug ripped through their local village. Or the ill-fated beachside retreat amid a lacerating tropical storm that Sophie took with her mother and sister to mourn her father's death.

Classic literature stages endless scenes of summer holidays, some successful and delightful, others, erm, less so. In this joyful episode to celebrate the northern hemisphere summer, Sophie and Jonty travel from the idyllic to the catastrophic by way of a varied and surprising collections of classics taken from many time periods. As they journey through summer suns, winds and rains, they begin to realize just how many writers have used hot weather and family holidays to depict the rich complexities of the human heart and the transformations their characters must undergo in the course of literary narrative.

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It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world. 

The 22 year old James Boswell, born and raised on a large country estate outside Edinburgh, has escaped his ambitious and pushy Presbyterian parents and arrived in London. They want him to follow the family footsteps and become a lawyer. He wants a commission in the guards - which means that he wants to loaf around London in peacetime wearing a smart uniform and getting paid. But more than that, he wants to make a splash – to leave his mark among the great writers and artists of his day. 

Boswell will go on to write the "Life of Samuel Johnson," maybe the greatest biography ever written, and the founding text in modern biography. But in 1762 he’s having trouble getting a start on his career. When this journal was discovered hidden away in a house in Aberdeen in the 20th century, the full extent of Boswell’s literary genius was finally understood. The "London Journal" was published to instant notoriety and celebrity, because of Boswell’s tell-all sexual adventures and total frankness about his efforts to make a mark on literature, and his own life.

We see Boswell in company with the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, and we hear about his adventures with his most treasured possession – a reuseable eighteenth-century condom, fabricated from sheeps' intestines.

Content warning: this episode includes scenes of sexual violence.

Books referred to in this episode:

James Boswell, London Journal

James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson

James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary

Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

John Hunter, A Treatise of Venereal Disease

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Tatler and The Spectator

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

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Welcome to London in the swinging sixties. One man fights off a towering inferno, navigates a zombie apocalypse, and an invading fleet of evil foreigners, while doing an extraordinary amount of shagging along the way. But we’re not talking about Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This is the Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in the - flip that 9 upside down - 1660s of Restoration Britain.  

Pepys’ contribution to history, literature and the modern soul is second to none, but it was his reforms to the navy that made him a big cheese in his day. And, speaking of cheese, this is a man who loves his parmesan - as we’ll be discovering. 

Without very little precedence to draw upon, Pepys - a nobody at the time - sat down on 1 January 1660 and spilled his soul and most intimate secrets onto the page in a way nobody had done before. He kept it up for the next ten years, giving us a front row seat at the frivolous court of King Charles II, the Great Fire of London, the horrific plague of 1665, and the bosoms of many unfortunate women who willingly or otherwise faced his advances. 

Join us for the the first episode in a series about personal diaries from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s and 1900s.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys

John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Spectator

Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

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Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- especially for Jane Austen. On and off the page, Austen paid a lot of attention to the breakfast table. In real life, Austen woke before her family, played the piano and got the breakfast ready, before retreating to write for the rest of the morning. And in the novels this meal is no less foundational: it's when we get to see the characters as they really are, sometimes up and about for hours before downing a boiled egg and a piece of toast, barely managing to consume a thin piece of bread and butter, or shoveling up pork, eggs and coffee after a morning's ride. Breakfast is the least formal meal of the day, so we see lots of interactions that can't happen at dinner, lunch or supper, when servants are present. At all times, Austen pays meticulous attention to what gets eaten, how, and why, and of course what is revealed about all of her characters when they sit down to table.

Join us for a joyful romp through Austen's meals, in a studio recording of a session Sophie and Jonty presented at the Sorrento Writers Festival in April 2025, with the world-renowned Austen scholar Clara Tuite, whose "Thirty Great Myths About Jane Austen", co-authored with Sophie's Princeton colleague Claudia Johnson, is a must-read for any Janeite.

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In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece he filed a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglass, Wilde's lover. It was the beginning of a series of legal, emotional and financial disasters for Oscar Wilde, and led to the last of his great works: The Ballad of Reading Gaol. 

In previous episodes we looked at Wilde's break-out collection of fairy tales (the Happy Prince), a novel (Dorian Gray) and his greatest play. With The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde's career culminated, and ended, with a long poem. It tells the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who murdered his girlfriend and was executed at Reading Gaol, where Wilde was also incarcerated, in July 1896. With "Reading Goal," Wilde's most distinctive literary device, the paradox, stops being a force of subversive delight, and becomes a grim, philosophical reflection on the impossibility of happiness. 

The poem was published in 1898 under the name C33, which was Wilde’s prison name. It seemed to herald a new beginning for Wilde - the work of a reflective, penitent and compassionate artist - but it was actually his swan song. He was unable to write anything else before his death at the age of 46 in 1900.

Works referred to in this episode:

Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” (1898) De profundis (pub. 1905)

John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel (1937)

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

Anon. Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors' Bloody Register, (1774)

Susan Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison, (1883)

Marcus Clark, For the Term of His Natural Life, (1872)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

William Wordsworth, the “Lucy” poems (1798-1801)

Ballads by Keats, Byron and the Border poets (18C)

John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)

John Milton, De doctrina christiana (written 17C, pub 1825) and the Divorce Tracts (1643-45)

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896)

Edward Carpenter, “Civilization, Its Cause and Cure” and other essays (1889)

D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1828)

E.M. Forster Maurice, (written 1913-14, pub. 1972)

Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, Freedom Magazine (founded 1886)

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

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Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, or MND, to his death less than two years later. It is a confronting, blow-by-blow account of the physical deterioration caused by MND, but also a testament to humanity’s capacity for empathy, love and redemption. 

In this special episode, recorded in support of MotorOn (which raises funding for MND research), Jonty talks to Professor Dominic Rowe - director of the Macquarie University Centre for MND and one of the world’s leading experts in MND. 

When Every Note Played begins, Richard is recently divorced from his wife Karina, but neither have been able to move on from their anger and endless emotional ruminating. But when Richard is diagnosed, Karina becomes his primary carer. Over the last months of his life, they learn to forgive one another and move on - one towards death, the other towards creative rebirth. 

Every Note Played is the fifth novel by Lisa Genova, who made her debut with the bestselling Still Alice in 2007. Still Alice was adapted into a film, with Julianne Moore giving an Oscar winning performance in the title role as the 50 year old Alice who develops onset dementia. Richard Glatzer directed the film while suffering from advanced MND - and he died a few months after release. Inspired by Glatzer, and their friendship, Genova wrote Every Note Played.

Content warning: this episode is a frank conversation about a subject some may find disturbing.

For more information about MND, please go to: 

Macquarie Centre for MND Research - www.mndnsw.org.au - the site has links to info lines and information packs 

If you are interested in donating to MotorOn and supporting the work of the Macqueries Centre for MND Research, please go to www.motoron.org

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The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895 at the sumptuous St James' Theatre in London, was Wilde’s last, and without question his greatest piece of dramatic writing. The handbag, the cucumber sandwiches, the Bunburying and the first class ticket to Worthing all come together to create a timeless classic that has been rarely out of performance since its debut.

It was a smash-hit from the moment it opened, but even as the lights went up, Wilde was grabbing the spotlight in the press and the courts with his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's young gay lover Bosie.

None of this is apparent on first viewing "Earnest," which seemingly refuses to be serious. It's a farce and a romance and a fairy tale -- but it's also a radical confession of homosexual attraction and a bitter satire on Victorian morality and domestic politics. It’s also a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience which was itself a parody of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement in England.

Content warning to listeners: reading this play – and possibly just listening to this episode - will cause you to irritate your family members by attempting aphoristic remarks and epigrammatic witticisms.

Books and writers mentioned in this episode:

Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew Sturgis

Sodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B Kaplan

Oscar Wilde, Vera, or, The Nihilists; Salome; The Importance of Being Earnest; Lady Windermere's Fan; A Woman of No Importance; The Ideal Husband.

Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."; "The Decay of Lying"; "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"; "The Critic as Artist"

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Much Ado About Nothing

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal; The Rivals

Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer

Henry Arthur Jones, The Silver King; Saints and Sinners

Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emile Zola

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler; The Doll's House

George Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

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Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabeth Craft.

Today we’re talking about Gretchen’s take on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel, which is packed with sometimes brilliant and sometimes merely glib aphorisms and witticisms. We talk about why pithy sayings are so appealing, whether they are ever really true, and why Wilde was so obsessed with this kind of writing. A companion episode to episode 63 on the book itself.

Mentioned on this episode:

Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, Happier and Home and Secrets of Adulthood.

Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft: Happier the podcast.

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

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