The Diary records the daily events in the lives of a London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances over a period of 15 months.

In an era of rising expectations within the lower-middle classes, the daily routines and modest ambitions described in the Diary were instantly recognised by its contemporary readers, and provided later generations with a glimpse of the past that it became fashionable to imitate.

It helped to establish a genre of humorous popular fiction based on lower or lower-middle class aspirations, and was the forerunner of numerous fictitious diary novels in the later 20th century.

The younger George followed his father, first as a reporter and later on the stage; the 7-years-younger Weedon studied at the West London School of Art and had some success as a portrait painter before becoming a comic actor.

He continued his career on the stage with considerable success until 1918, making his name playing roles he described as "cowards, cads and snobs", and as browbeaten small men under the thumb of authority.

It turns out to be shabby and down-at-heel; furthermore, having liberally supplied fellow-guests—among them Mr Padge—with food and drink which he thinks is free, Pooter is presented at the end with a large bill that he can barely afford to pay.

As the couple celebrate, a letter arrives from Lupin announcing his engagement to "Lillie Girl": "We shall be married in August, and among our guests we hope to see your old friends Gowing and Cummings".

[10] The Punch serialisation ended in May 1889 with the diary entry for 21 March, which records the Pooters and their friends celebrating the minor triumph of Lupin's appointment as a clerk at Perkupp's.

[11] That was the intended end of the diary; however, when the writers were preparing the manuscript for publication as a book, they added a further four months' entries to the text, and included 26 illustrations by Weedon Grossmith.

[13] "It is not so funny that an occasional interruption would be resented, and such thread of story as runs through it can be grasped and followed without much strain on the attention ... it is rather difficult to get really interested in the sayings and doings of either the Pooter family or their friends."

[15] The Speaker's critic thought the book "a study in vulgarity",[18] while The New York Times, reviewing the first American edition, found the work largely incomprehensible: "There is that kind of quiet, commonplace, everyday joking in it which we are to suppose is highly satisfactory to our cousins across the water ... Our way of manufacturing fun is different".

In his essay "On People in Books", published earlier that year, the writer and humourist Hilaire Belloc hailed the Diary as "one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time ... a glory for us all".

Birrell wrote that he ranked Charles Pooter alongside Don Quixote as a comic literary figure, and added a note of personal pride that one of the characters in the book—"an illiterate charwoman, it is true"—carried his name.

[n 1] In its review of this edition The Bookman's critic wrote of Charles Pooter: "You laugh at him—at his small absurdities, his droll mishaps, his well-meaning fussiness; but he wins upon you and obtains your affection, and even your admiration, he is so transparently honest, so delightfully and ridiculously human".

[30] Morton posits that several of the leading characters in Waugh's early novels, though socially far removed from the Pooters, share the bafflement of Charles and Carrie with the problems of a changing world.

[33] In the years after the Second World War the book's stock remained high; Osbert Lancaster deemed it "a great work of art",[34] and similar enthusiasm was expressed by a new generation of writers and social historians.

[35] This accolade was echoed a further generation on by A. N. Wilson, who wrote in his study of the Victorian era: "Who is to say that Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley are more typical of the [1890s] than the lower-middle class Charles and Carrie Pooter?

"[36] Wilson also observed the extent to which the Pooters had become recognised as "arbiters of the greatest good taste", as the late 20th-century English middle classes sought to acquire or preserve authentic Victorian features in their carefully crafted "period" homes.

[37] A Spectator article of 2008 remarks on how such houses as "The Laurels", the humble habitats of 1890s City clerks, had by the 21st century become desirable £1 million-plus homes in what it terms "banker land".

[38] Peter Bailey, in his study "White Collars, Gray Lives" (1999), traces the beginnings of literary interest in the lower-middle classes to the "disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers" that faced Victorian writers in the last quarter of the 19th century.

[4] Although many writers had themselves come from humble backgrounds, they often sought to disguise their origins through scorn: "putting the boot in on the lower middle classes", says Bailey, "has long been the intellectual's blood sport".

In the works of writers such as George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and E. M. Forster, characters emerged who, despite the recognisably Pooterish aspects of their lives, were by no means entirely absurd.

In cases such as these, writes Bailey, "disdain could change to admiration and national self-identification, as the Little Man ... was transposed into Everyman, a model of cheerful resilience in times of crisis.

[8] An early example is Anita Loos's novel of 1925: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady in which the protagonist, Lorelei Lee, records her flirtatious adventure in prose that "follows the mannerisms of colloquial speech" and suggests innocence or ignorance yet, the critic Elyse Graham observes, "burlesques, in excoriating detail, the vernacular of the American middle class".

[44] In 1982 came the first appearance of Sue Townsend's teenage creation, Adrian Mole, whose passage into young manhood and early middle age is charted in a long series of diaries.

The New York Times critic wrote that it "captures neatly the way modern women teeter between 'I am woman' independence and a pathetic girlie desire to be all things to all men.

[51] Jon Wilde of The Guardian observes this characteristic in a number of British TV comedy creations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Captain Mainwaring, Victor Meldrew, and Peep Show's Mark Corrigan are all examples of characters "whose blinkered view of themselves is forever in sharp contrast to how they are perceived by the world".

[53] Hammerton remarks that the Grossmiths "would surely appreciate the irony in seeing features of the lower middle-class existence they mocked so mercilessly becoming the more universal model for 20th century family life".

[55][n 3] In September 1954 a stage version of the Diary, by Basil Dean and Richard Blake, was presented at London's Arts Theatre with a cast that included George Benson and Dulcie Gray as the Pooters and Leslie Phillips as Lupin.

Anthony Hartley, writing in The Spectator, classed this production as "fair-to-middling", with sympathetic performances from the principals: "[I]t is a precondition of this kind of play that everybody concerned should have a heart of gold: only in the case of Mr. Pooter's employer, Mr. Perkupp, do we actually hear the metal chinking.