Fiction · 1892
The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith
Charles Pooter, a proud, painfully ordinary London clerk with a modest house, a devoted wife, and an unshakeable faith in his own dignity, records a year of his life in scrupulous daily detail — social snubs, small domestic disasters, a wayward son, and a stream of jokes nobody else finds funny — in blissful, oblivious sincerity throughout.
George and Weedon Grossmith published The Diary of a Nobody in 1892, expanded from a serial that had run in Punch magazine; its gentle, precisely observed comedy of suburban self-importance has kept it continuously in print for well over a century.
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About the authors
1847–1912 · Victorian
George Grossmith (1847–1912) was born in London and became one of the most popular comic performers of the Victorian stage, creating many of the principal comic baritone roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Savoy Theatre, including the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado, over a career of more than a decade with D'Oyly Carte's company. With his younger brother Weedon he wrote The Diary of a Nobody (1892), first serialized in Punch magazine, a comic novel presented as the diary of a pompous, socially anxious London clerk that has remained continuously in print and is widely regarded as one of the finest comic novels in English. He later toured successfully as a solo entertainer performing his own songs and sketches. He died in Folkestone, Kent, at sixty-four.
1852–1919 · Victorian
Weedon Grossmith (1854–1919) was born in London, the younger brother of the comic performer George Grossmith, and trained first as a painter before turning to acting, appearing on the London stage for decades and later writing several plays of his own. With George he co-wrote The Diary of a Nobody (1892), contributing its original illustrations as well as half the text, a comic novel serialized in Punch that has long outlasted either brother's stage career in popularity. He continued to act well into the early years of British cinema, appearing in a number of silent films shortly before his death. He died in London at sixty-four.
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