the diary of a nobody by george and weedon grossmith

Maybe not a book to be translated around the world, but the jokes have lasted longer than the currency: 'I am a poor man, but I would gladly give ten shillings to find out who sent me the insulting Christmas card I received this morning.' True fans are laughing after the first few words of Charles Pooter's expressive complaint. It has never been out of print, and is full of fascinating details of daily life as well as excruciating class warfare and British embarrassment tropes. George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, 1892, first appeared in the humour magazine Punch – but is better than that makes it sound.

Susan Coolidge's 1872 book What Katy Did, beloved by generations of children, contains a scene where the older siblings laugh at young Dorry's diary, with its repeated entry: 'Forgit what did.' Many of us could empathise with that, though we can't hope to inspire, of all unlikely things, a Philip Larkin poem about unkept diaries called Forget What Did, the title taken from Dorry. Mr Lockwood will learn about true emotion day by day as he finds out and writes down the story of Heathcliff and the Earnshaws. It's easily forgotten, but Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë has a skeletal framework of a diary: 'I have just returned from a visit to my landlord … Yesterday afternoon set in misty and cold'. It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for the history of women and their writing – and, perhaps, women's diaries – over the past 250 years. But our heroine also writes a journal, and then sews it into her underwear for secrecy (she describes it as 'in my undercoat, next my linen'), so she is wearing it at all times.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is usually described as an epistolary novel. Fictional diaries have been amusing and entertaining us since the modern novel's early days.

The diary of a nobody by george and weedon grossmith