Meet Charles Pooter: a man of modest means and monumental self-regard, clerk in the City and king of his little house in Holloway. Over the course of a year, he records in his diary the small triumphs and spectacular humiliations of lower-middle-class Victorian life: the dinner party that goes wrong, the friends who never visit, the boss who forgets his name, the son's disastrous career choices. What seems at first like the diary of an ordinary nobody reveals itself as something far more delightful: a precise, affectionate, devastating portrait of a man who takes himself very seriously indeed. George Grossmith's 1892 masterpiece of comic fiction gave English literature one of its most enduring archetypes, and it still lands today with the precise, gentle accuracy of a slap in the face. You will recognize every character here, because you have met them, or been them, or fled from them at parties. The mundane has never been so magnificently observed.
