Product Description

The diary is that of a man who acknowledges that he is not a "Somebody" - Charles Pooter of 'The Laurels', Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, a clerk in the city of London - and it chronicles in hilarious detail the everyday life of the lower middle class during the Great Victorian age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #739465 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
First published in 1892, this classic satire on English snobbery remains razor sharp 100 years on. The 'nobody' of the title is city clerk Mr Pooter who, inflated with pomposity well above his top hat, decides to record the daily round of his family and friends for posterity. The result is a hugely entertaining compilation of mundane mishaps and misunderstandings as poor self-important Mr Pooter endeavours to compete with the more lively characters who invade his diary. The humour of this book endures because fortunately so do the Mr Pooters of this world. (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
Founded in 1906 by J.M. Dent, the Everyman Library has always tried to make the best books ever written available to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Unique editorial features that help Everyman Paperback Classics stand out from the crowd include: a leading scholar or literary critic's introduction to the text, a biography of the author, a chronology of her or his life and times, a historical selection of criticism, and a concise plot summary. All books published since 1993 have also been completely restyled: all type has been reset, to offer a clarity and ease of reading unique among editions of the classics; a vibrant, full-color cover design now complements these great texts with beautiful contemporary works of art. But the best feature must be Everyman's uniquely low price. Each Everyman title offers these extensive materials at a price that competes with the most inexpensive editions on the market-but Everyman Paperbacks have durable binding, quality paper, and the highest editorial and scholarly standards.

About the Author
Kate Flint is is Reader in Victorian and Modern English Literature and Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. Her publications include The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (1993) and many articles on early nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and art history.

Customer Reviews

Not for everybody but VERY much for some people...
If you respond at all to this gentle, loving, intricately detailed, and acute (but never hostile)evocation of late-Victorian London, the chances are good that it will become one of your favorite books. The humor is rather special, and I've found that some Americans simply can't "get into" Grossmith. As for me, I reread the book every year and the very thought of it can make me smile.

An Evergreen Comic Masterpiece.
This book must be the most nearly perfect piece of comic writing in English, its humour gentle and subtle, its depiction of character, class, time and location flawless. It fixes forever the late-Victorian world of the respectable Lower Middle Class, populated by clerks, petty merchants and tradesmen, observing it with both objectivity and affection. It is splendidly read on tape by Frederick Davidson, whose assumed accent is perfectly gauged to reflect the upwardly-mobile aspirations of the Mr.Charles Pooter, the self-confessed nobody of the title, and which slips down the social scale by several notches in moments of stress and frustration. Though superficially simple, the construction of the narrative is complex in the extreme, with comic situations often being built up over a long period, and with clues carefully planted in earlier sections, only to come to fruition later. It is particularly impressive how the main characters - Pooter himself, his long-suffering and often silly but supportive wife Carrie and his exasperating son Lupin - emerge as rounded characters from apparently simple diary entries and achieve a realism and familiarity as great as any in more serious literature. The situations in which they find themselves - or rather get themselves - are not only ludicrously amusing, but also close to the normality of life as many live it, and one can often, uncomfortably, recognise one's self or one's friends in their reactions to them. What makes the Diary an enduring masterpiece is however the gentle and affectionate treatment of human weakness - and greatness. Pooter may be pompous, foolish and sometimes sycophantic, but he is also loyal, decent and honourable and his life, and his family's, for all its pettiness, also has its dignity. I first read the Diary over forty years ago and it has never ceased to delight me since - it remains a treasured bedside book to be opened at random - and this splendid tape of it is an ideal companion for long or short automobile journeys. (An interesting footnote is that George Grossmith, as a singer and actor, created many of the best known Gilbert and Sullivan roles on stage).

Thoroughly Entertaining
The 'Nobody' of the title is one Charles Pooter, an ordinary middle-class Londoner in the late 19th century who reasons that if Pepys and Johnson can write diaries to entertain people, why should his diary be any less exciting? And so we are amused by such characters as Pooter's unpredictable son Lupin, his good friends Cumming and Gowing, and not least Pooter himself, whose most fascinating and hilarious trait is his tendency to write people off as lacking in humour when they fail to laugh at his occasional pun, whilst exhibiting a distinct lack of humour himself when it comes to some of the more trivial aspects of life.

Pooter's descriptions of the mundane, as well as the occasionally unusual, happenings of daily life are told in extraordinary detail, which brings a real vividness to some of the amusing predicaments our friend finds himself in. And he really is our friend by the end of the book. There is a certain air of pathos about this man that proves quite endearing. His Victorian prudery and sensibility provokes much laughter (reading this on the train to London, I had to put it down a couple of times to avoid drawing attention to myself), yet also provokes a certain affection for a character who is as tragic as he is admirable. That is, despite some of his more pathetic idionsyncracies, the warmth and genuineness of his character shine through.