page_title: George Grossmith
section_title: Early performing career
hierarchical_section_title: George Grossmith / Life and career / Early performing career
caption_attribution_description: English: Source: http://pinafore.www3.50megs.com/ggysor01.html George Grossmith in The Sorcerer, c. 1877
context_page_description: George Grossmith 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 created a series of nine characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore, the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado. He also wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel The 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 an actor, playwright and producer of Edwardian musical comedies.
context_section_description: Young Grossmith received some recognition for amateur songs and sketches at private parties and, beginning in 1864, at penny readings. He also participated in a small number of theatricals as an amateur, including playing John Chodd, Jr. in Robertson's play, Society, at the Gallery of Illustration, in 1868. The after-piece was a burlesque, written by Grossmith's father, on the Dickens play No Thoroughfare.  He then played the title role in Paul Pry, a comedy by Poole, also at the Gallery of Illustration, in 1870. But he and his father felt that his talents lay in "sketch" comedy rather than theatre.  The younger Grossmith admired the comic pianist and entertainer John Orlando Parry, who created and performed in many of the German Reed Entertainments, and he tried to emulate Parry in developing his own sketches, consisting of humorous anecdotes, mildly satirical comment, ad lib chat, and comic songs centred on the piano.
  Grossmith took to the professional stage in 1870 with a sketch called Human Oddities, written by his father, and a song called "The Gay Photographer" (that is, the "carefree" photographer). The song, with words by Grossmith's father and music by young Grossmith, concerns a photographer who broke the heart of a young lady named Miss Jenkins; so she drank his chemicals and died. In late 1870, the younger Grossmith appeared on his own with a nightly spot at the "old Polytechnic" in Regent Street, where comic sketches alternated with scientific and serious lectures for the entertainment of the public.  Human Oddities and another sketch, The Yellow Dwarf, were successful for Grossmith, and he took the former work on tour for six months.  An 1871 Grossmith sketch was called He was a Careful Man. Biographer Tony Joseph notes that, except for a few early pieces, nearly all of Grossmith's material was written and composed by Grossmith himself.  Joseph describes the sketches as "a light-hearted sending up of various aspects of contemporary life and manners.  ...he was the complete performer... as a pianist (he performed for the most part sitting at a piano)... as a raconteur... as a mimic, facial expression, timing—he had it all.  A short, dapper figure, he turned his lack of inches to positive advantage, and audiences took to him everywhere."
  Grossmith toured in the summer of 1871 with Mr and Mrs Howard Paul and occasionally afterwards.  He and Mrs Paul would also appear together in The Sorcerer in 1877. Also in 1871, at the Polytechnic, he performed three more sketches, The Puddleton Penny Readings, Theatricals at Thespis Lodge and The Silver Wedding (including what would be one of his most popular songs, "I am so Volatile", with words by his father). On 14 February 1872, Grossmith gave a sketch parody of a penny reading at the Gaiety Theatre, London, since on Ash Wednesday, theatres refrained from presenting costumed performances out of respect for the holiday.  At the time, coincidentally, the Gaiety was presenting Thespis, Gilbert and Sullivan's first collaboration. Throughout these years, Grossmith continued working at Bow Street during the day.
  In 1873, Grossmith and his father began joint tours of humorous recitations and comic sketches at literary institutes and public halls, to church groups and to branches of the YMCA all over England and even in Scotland and Wales.  Young Grossmith's sketches at this time included The Puddleton Penny Readings, Our Choral Society and In the Stalls.  They toured almost constantly for the following three years, but they returned to see their families in London on weekends. Around this time, he met and became firm friends with Fred Sullivan, and afterwards, he met Sullivan's brother Arthur. Through Arthur Cecil, Sullivan, and some of their friends, Grossmith began to be invited to entertain at private "society" parties, which he continued to do throughout his career.  Later, these parties would often occur late in the evening after Grossmith performed at the Savoy Theatre. In 1876, he collaborated with Florence Marryat, the author and reciter, on Entre Nous.  This piece con
caption: Grossmith as Wells in The Sorcerer, 1877
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