The Diary of a Nobody

About this book

Mr Charles Pooter, a respectable, self-important City clerk, moves with his wife Carrie into a house in Holloway, north London, called The Laurels, and decides to keep a diary, for he fails to see why it should not be interesting just because he is not a 'Somebody'. He records his small triumphs and endless humiliations: rude tradesmen, the jokes of his friends Gowing and Cummings, his disastrous home improvements with red enamel paint, a ball at the Mansion House, and the antics of his fashionable son Lupin.

Context and significance

George Grossmith (1847–1912), a comic singer famous in Gilbert and Sullivan operas, wrote it with his brother Weedon, who drew the pictures; it first appeared in Punch and as a book in 1892. Gently mocking suburban snobbery, it remains one of the funniest books in English and gave the language the word 'Pooterish'. Compare Three Men in a Boat.

About the author