This fictitious diary details fifteen months in the life of Mr Charles Pooter, a middle-aged city clerk of lower middle-class status but significant social aspirations, living in the fictional “Brickfield Terrace” in London. Written by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith, who also contributed the illustrations, the Diary was serialized in Punch magazine in 1888 and 1889, and was first printed in book form in 1892. Due to much of the humor deriving from Mr Pooter’s comical tendency toward self-importance, the book has spawned the word “Pooterish” to describe the taking of oneself excessively seriously.

The chapter summaries give a taste of Pooter’s sense of self: “I make one of the best jokes of my life”; “grossly insulted by a cabman”; “I make another good joke”; “the dream of my life realised”; “I make two good jokes”; “one of the happiest days of my life”. The once-in-a-lifetime joke is a stinker: after his friend Gowing comments on the smell of dry rot in Pooter’s home, Pooter rebuts: “You’re talking a lot of dry rot yourself.” Rot, in fact, is shot through this diary. His son Lupin finds his father’s nightmares about flaming ice to be “utter rot”, moves to London so as not to “rot away my life in the suburbs”, and dismisses Charles’ anguish, after the charwoman uses pages from his journal to wipe up kitchen fat and leavings, as “fuss about the loss of a few pages from a rotten diary”. Every attempt at social charm and grace molders beneath Pooter’s indelicate touch. And the “happiest day of his life” is purely economic: his boss, Mr Perkupp, purchases and gifts Pooter the freehold beneath his own home, and Lupin becomes engaged to one “Miss Posh”, whose father “could buy up Perkupp’s from over his head at any moment with ready cash”. But that’s Nobody’s business.

Early critics of the Diary were rather Pooterish. The Athenaeum called it “hopeless vulgarity”; The Speaker believed the book was nothing more than “a study in vulgarity”; and the New York Times thought it was inaccessibly British: “There is that kind of quiet, commonplace, everyday joking in it which we are to suppose is highly satisfactory to our cousins across the water”. In the early decades of the twentieth century, however, Diary of a Nobody achieved a status of which its everyman antihero could only dream. The former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery regarded “any bedroom I occupy as unfurnished without a copy of it”; Hillaire Belloc called it “one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time”; The Bookman found Pooter “so delightfully and ridiculously human”; and Evelyn Waugh made reference to the Diary in Brideshead Revisited, believing it to be “the funniest book in the world”.