Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist, born in Walsall on 2 May 1859 and active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is best known for Three Men in a Boat, the comic travelogue published in 1889, a book that brought him his widest fame. His other works included Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Three Men on the Bummel, and several novels, along with plays and non-fiction written across the next few decades.

Jerome’s early life was marked by instability and hard work. He was the fourth and last child of Jerome Clapp, later Jerome Clapp Jerome, and Marguerite Jones. His father was a nonconformist lay preacher and Staffordshire coalmine owner; after the colliery failed, the family moved first to Stourbridge and then to east London, where his father became an ironmonger without much success. Jerome attended the Philological School of General Instruction in Marylebone, later St Marylebone Grammar School, but he thought its methods foolish and of little use. When his father died of a heart attack in 1871, the thirteen-year-old Jerome left school and became a clerk for the London and North Western Railway, working long hours to support his family.

The theatre drew him next. Inspired by his sister Blandina’s love of it, Jerome joined a repertory troupe in 1877. The company worked on very little money, often using the actors’ own small funds for costumes and props. After three years on the road without clear success, he tried other work: journalism, schoolmastering, packing, and a solicitor’s office. He kept writing essays, satires, and stories in his spare time, though most were rejected. His first real break came in 1885, when On the Stage – and Off, a comic memoir of his acting years, was published in weekly instalments in The Play.

Success arrived more fully in 1886 with Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a collection of humorous essays that had appeared in Home Chimes. The book sold exceptionally well, helped by Andrew W. Tuer’s pale lemon binding and by a playful habit of marking new “editions” as sales rose. For the first time, Jerome was financially comfortable. In 1888 he married Georgina, who had divorced her first husband, William Marris, for misconduct and cruelty. Jerome also left his solicitor’s office post to write full time. Encouraged by his wife, and feeling he needed a holiday, he planned a skiff trip up the Thames with two close friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel; the following year came Three Men in a Boat.

Jerome continued to write fiction, non-fiction, and plays, though he never again reached the same level of success. His most successful play was The Passing of the Third Floor Back, produced in 1908, while the semi-autobiographical novel Paul Kelver, published in 1902, helped win praise from more serious critics. Earlier, many reviewers had looked down on his work as colloquial and vulgar, the very qualities that made it popular with readers and theatre audiences. That plain, conversational ease is still the source of his appeal: Jerome wrote from offices, cheap theatrical rooms, family pressure, and comic observation, and he made ordinary irritation and idleness feel sharply human.