This is the sort of book that I would never have dreamed of reading 10 years ago. I discovered from the introduction to [Diary of a Nobody] that its author, George Grossmith, had been a very successful entertainer in late Victorian England, having been a star of Gilbert and Sullivan's productions with the D'Oyly Carte Opera company for 12 years, and then an even more successful solo performer, earning £10,000 in the 10 months after left the company. I wouldn't ever have been interested enough in Grossmith to have searched out a copy of this autobiography, which must have been out of print for a very long time, but of course it was available on line. To be honest, I intended to glance at it rather than read the whole thing, but it was very short, and certain elements cast some light on the Victorian literary scene which I was reading over for my revision at the time (George Grossmith's father had a profitable sideline with a one-man show of excerpts from Dickens's work) and so I carried on. The first two thirds engaged my interest and were quite readable, as Grossmith used the same informal style as in [Diary of a Nobody] in detailing his childhood and early life. And the book provided some quite interesting insights into the entertainments of the Victorian period and the lives of the people providing them. But the book petered out completely into a series of random letters from the more famous of his aquaintances, the names of whom of course, meant nothing to me. If it had stopped before that section it would have been a much better book. ( )