The eternally hard-done-by Charles Pooter is one of the most timeless comic characters in English fiction -- as alive and well in the real world today as he was when he first appeared in 1892. Mr. Pooter is a well-meaning Victorian clerk and one of London's growing army of lower-middle-class suburbanites set on improving their social standing. Aspiring to posterity, Mr. Pooter embarks on a diary. Throughout its pages, the accident-prone author is drawn into one petty confrontation after another: run-ins with idle tradesmen, insolent office juniors, and abusive neighbors, while simultaneously dealing with his wife's heedless indulgence in flights of fashion and the reckless antics of his son, Lupin. Pooter is a lovably absurd Everyman: quietly self-satisfied, intent on keeping up appearances, yet sublimely ignorant of his won pretensions and snobberies -- shortcomings he is only too quick to see in others. His rose-tinted vision of himself is unwittingly exposed at every turn -- to hilarious effect.
"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." So wrote the anxious, accident-prone, occasionally waspish, Charles Pooter, who has come to be seen as the epitome of English suburban life. His diary chronicles encounters with difficult tradesmen, the delights of home improvements, small parties, minor embarrassments, and problems with his troublesome son. The suburban world he inhabits is hilariously and painfully familiar in its small-mindedness and its essential decency. Wonderfully illustrated with Grossmith's line drawings, this very amusing Victorian comedy created in Charles Pooter a cultual icon and English archetype. Both celebration and critique, Diary of a Nobody has often been imitated, but never duplicated.
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