A charming satire of middle-class suburbia by George and Weedon Grossmith, with original illustrations from the latter and an afterword by Paul Bailey.
George Grossmith enjoyed a successful career spanning four decades as an accomplished singer, comic actor and songwriter. He was particularly renowned for his performances in a number of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. His younger brother Weedon trained as an artist and worked as a portrait painter before turning his hand to acting and playwriting. The brothers shared a gift for comedy and from 1888 to 1889 they collaborated on a series of brilliantly observed columns in Punch magazine featuring the diary of an impossibly pompous lower-middle-class bank clerk named Charles Pooter. The Diary of a Nobody went on to be published in book form in 1892 and it has been in print ever since.
The funniest book in the world
*Evelyn Waugh*
There's a universality about Pooter that touches everybody . . .
[he] fits into the tradition of absurd humour that the British do
well, which started with Jonathan Swift and runs through Lewis
Carroll and Edward Lear to Monty Python
*Time Out*
Pooter himself is as gentle as you could wish, a wonderful
character, genuinely lovable. The book is beautifully
constructed
*Glasgow Herald*
One of those rare books that nails a cultural archetype and has won
the affection of successive generations
*The Times*
The funniest book about a certain type of Englishness . . . there
is a whole line of these comic characters like Captain Mainwaring
in Dad's Army, or Basil Fawlty
*The Times*
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