My clear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house, "The Laurels," Brickfield Terrace, Holloway - a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door, which, by-the-by, we keep locked with the chain up. Cummings, Gowing, and our other intimate friends always come to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking her from her work. We have a nice little back garden which runs down to the railway.

Charles Pooter and his wife Caroline have just moved to a new home. Mr Pooter is a City of London clerk with Perkupps. The couple have a 20-year-old son, Lupin, who works as a bank clerk in Oldham. From the beginning a pattern is set whereby the small vexations of the Pooters' daily lives are recounted, many of them arising from Pooter's unconscious self-importance and pomposity. Trouble with servants, tradesmen and office juniors, together with minor social embarrassments and humiliations, occur regularly.

The Diary of a Nobody is a novel written by brothers George and Weedon Grossmith that helped to establish a genre of humorous popular fiction based on lower class aspirations. It also paved the way for other kinds of fictitious diary novels in the 20th century.

"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. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth." So Charles Pooter of The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace Holloway, commences his journal. A somewhat stuffy but very human senior clerk in an undescribed business, Pooter likes nothing better than to putter around his suburban home -- perhaps because of his ability to make high drama of trivial circumstances, and get himself...

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. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.