This 1892 portrait of suburban London created a cultural icon - Charles Pooter, anxiety-ridden, small-minded, irascible inhabitant of a terraced house in Holloway - whose lugubrious face has launched, as Kate Flint points out in her lively introduction to this edition, a fistful of TV sitcoms including The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and One Foot in the Grave, Sue Townsend's The Diary of Adrian Mole and most of the complete works of Alan Ayckbourn. Despite the rather laboured nature of much of the writing and the fact that time has withered many of the jokes, there is something mildly endearing about the preposterous Pooter, an essentially decent soul who pooters along in a world of unreliable tradesmen, rebellious offspring and continuous slight social embarrassment.
By Arminta Wallace