Writing as a narrator describing events from his own past, Beerbohm presents himself as a moderately successful young English essayist and writer during the 1890s. He then purports to relate the tragic history of a friend and colleague of his named Enoch Soames. Soames is a contemporary of the younger Beerbohm; a fellow-Englishman of secure but moderate means, living off an inherited annuity, and an utterly obscure, forgettable, miserable, and unknown aspiring poet. Over the course of the story, he is the author and publisher of a succession of unsuccessful books of poems.