Charles Pooter is a man who believes he is somebody. The tragicomic miracle is that he isn't wrong to think so, he has a house, an occupation, a son who causes nothing but trouble, and a wife who tolerates him. But his diary, intended to immortalize his otherwise unremarkable existence, becomes instead a meticulous record of his own humiliations. Every social aspiration curdles into awkwardness. Every attempt at respectability collapses into farce. The diary spans fifteen months in the life of this Lower Middle-Class London clerk, chronicling dinner parties that go wrong, tradesmen who refuse to cooperate, friends who borrow money and don't return it, and his son Lupin's increasingly alarming romantic choices. Pooter records it all with complete sincerity, never once perceiving the gap between how he sees himself and how the reader sees him. The Grossmith brothers, this was their only collaboration, understood something essential about the human need to be significant, and how that need curdles into absurdity when left unexamined. The book endures because the specific target has become universal. We all know a Pooter. We all, in our more honest moments, are Pooter. It launched a genre of comic fiction about ordinary people and their grandiose self-perception, and it has never been out of print since 1892.
