George Grossmith enjoyed a successful career spanning four decades as an accomplished singer, comic actor and songwriter.

He was particularly renowned for his performances in a number of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. His younger brother Weedon trained as an artist and worked as a portrait painter before turning his hand to acting and playwriting.

The brothers shared a gift for comedy and from 1888 to 1889 they collaborated on a series of brilliantly observed columns in Punch magazine featuring the diary of an impossibly pompous lower-middle-class bank clerk named Charles Pooter.

The Diary of a Nobody went on to be published in book form in 1892 and it has been in print ever since.