Charles Pooter’s actions and attitudes show the absurdity of social aspirations. Pooter operates in a rigid social hierarchy made up of landowning, aristocratic elites who scorn the aspirations of middle-class people like Pooter; middle-class members who simultaneously aspire to rise above their local locations and look down on those in the working class; and working-class members who consider themselves equals or betters to those in the middle class.

As a middle-level clerk in an unnamed financial institution, Pooter is specifically a member of the lower middle class. The novel’s humor derives from the interplay between Pooter and his attempt to secure his way into society while simultaneously placing himself above the working-class people with whom he must interact day to day. Time and again, Pooter’s efforts are thwarted, and he fails to achieve either of these goals.

In the novel’s early chapters, he offends the butterman, butcher, and grocer’s boy in quick succession. Each encounter serves to put Pooter on the same social level as the tradesmen, and each results in a social snub for Pooter. The butterman openly says Pooter is not a gentleman; the butcher tells him he could buy up “things” like Pooter “by the dozen” (12), and the grocer’s boy uses the sacred front door reserved for important guests, a symbol of middle-class pretensions of refined gentility.