Mr Charles Pooter is a well-meaning city clerk and one of a growing number of upwardly mobile, lower middle-class suburbanites set on improving their social standing. Aspiring to posterity, he embarks on a diary in which he is actively drawn into petty confrontations, including run-ins with idle tradesmen, insolent office juniors and abusive neighbours; while simultaneously dealing with his wife's heedless indulgence in flights of fashion and the reckless antics of his vagabond son Lupin.