Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels.
Jerome was born in Walsall, in the English Midlands. Although his family struggled with poverty at times, he was able to attend a grammar school, but derived little benefit from it. After his father died in 1871 Jerome tried to earn a living in various occupations including a clerical post and three years as an actor. In his twenties he began writing and was able to publish some work, with increasing success. He married in 1888 and he published his most popular work, Three Men in a Boat, the following year. He continued to write fiction and non-fiction over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success. He also wrote plays, of which The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908) was the most successful. Most have remained unpublished.
His works were generally more popular with the general public than with reviewers, many of whom looked down on Jerome, declaring his writing colloquial and vulgar – the very characteristics that appealed to the book-buying and theatre-going public. Punch dubbed him "'Arry J. 'Arry". It was not until the publication of his semi-autobiographical novel Paul Kelver in 1902 that heavyweight critics began praising him.
Jerome was born in Walsall, England on 2 May 1859. He was the fourth and last child of Jerome Clapp (who later took the name Jerome Clapp Jerome) and his wife Marguerite, née Jones. Jerome junior was registered at birth as Jerome Clapp Jerome. He had two sisters, Paulina and Blandina, and one brother, Milton; the last died at an early age. The exiled Hungarian general György Klapka was staying with Jerome's family at the time of the boy's birth, and Jerome later adopted that surname as a second given name.
Jerome's father was a nonconformist lay preacher and Staffordshire coalmine owner; the boy's mother was the daughter of a Swansea lawyer. The biographer Damian Atkinson writes that Jerome senior was of puritan background and had trained as an architect and that his wife, also from a nonconformist family, had some financial assets. After the failure of the colliery the family moved to Stourbridge, Worcestershire, and later to east London, where Jerome senior became an ironmonger, not greatly successfully.
At the age of nine Jerome passed the entry test for the Philological School of General Instruction in Lisson Grove, Marylebone, which later became St Marylebone Grammar School. There he had his only formal education. He was not impressed by the school. He saw its methods as foolish and useless, cramming pupils full of unusable fact. The only good thing he had to say of the establishment was that it did not employ corporal punishment.
In 1871, when Jerome was thirteen, his father died of a heart attack and the boy became the family's sole wage-earner, leaving school to become a clerk for the London and North Western Railway. The pay was not generous and Jerome worked a great deal of overtime to support the family. His biographer Joseph Connolly writes, "He had not enjoyed school, and neither did he enjoy being a clerk. Sitting at a desk doing what he was told was not his idea of how life should be spent".
Jerome was inspired by his sister Blandina's love for the theatre, and he decided to try his hand at acting in 1877.
He joined a repertory troupe that produced plays on a shoestring budget, often drawing on the actors' own meagre resources – Jerome was penniless at the time – to purchase costumes and props. After three years on the road with no evident success, the 21-year-old Jerome decided that he had had enough of stage life and sought other occupations. He tried to become a journalist, writing essays, satires, and short stories, but most of them were rejected. Over the next few years, he was a schoolmaster, a packer, and a solicitor's clerk. He wrote prolifically in his spare time but success was elusive until his story On the Stage – and Off, a comic memoir of his experiences with the acting troupe, was published in 1885. It came out in weekly instalments in a paper called The Play.
The following year Jerome made a modestly successful début as a playwright with a gentle one-act comedy, a curtain-raiser to a farce at the Globe Theatre, London. The theatrical newspaper The Era commented:
Jerome was able to sell the American rights to the piece to the actor-manager J. K. Emmett.
In 1886 Jerome had his first big seller with the book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), a collection of humorous essays that had previously appeared in a newly founded magazine, Home Chimes, which would later serialise Three Men in a Boat. Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow sold exceptionally well. His publisher, Andrew W. Tuer, had the book bound in a very pale lemon cloth, which stood out well from the dark greens and browns more usual at the time, and he hit on a way of convincing the public that the book was a runaway best-seller: after the sale of a thousand copies, the words "Second Edition" were added to the cover. When the sale of two thousand was reached, "Third Edition" was substituted. Connolly comments, "This ingenious and curious device persisted, and before very long the book world was talking of little other than Jerome's new book, now in its 'twelfth' edition!"
Financially comfortable for the first time in his life, Jerome was now able to marry. His bride, Georgina, had divorced her abusive first husband, William Marris, for "misconduct and cruelty", receiving a decree nisi in December 1887, which became a decree absolute on 12 June 1888. She was awarded custody of their only child (also called Georgina, but known by her middle name, Elsie). On 21 June 1888, nine days after her decree absolute, she married Jerome at St Luke's Church, Chelsea. They were both aged 29. The best man was George Wingrave, a bank clerk, with whom Jerome had shared various sets of lodgings over several years. The couple took a flat in Chelsea, with a nurse to look after Elsie. They later had a daughter, Rowena, born in 1897, who became an actress.
Jerome remained keenly interested in writing for the theatre. His later plays of the 1880s were two one-act pieces: Fennel (1888, an English adaptation of François Coppée's Le Luthier de Crémone) and Sunset (1888, inspired by a poem by Tennyson).
Jerome, encouraged by his wife, gave up his post at the solicitor's office to become a full-time writer. He felt he needed a holiday and proposed to hire a skiff for a trip up the Thames, as he had done several times before, with two close male friends. George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel made up the party. Both, like Jerome, were now moderately prosperous: the former had been promoted at the bank and the latter was a rising artist and photographer. Thinking the trip should be a working holiday that might furnish material for a book, Jerome took a notebook with him. He later recalled:
The book, published in 1889, is a lively and, except for a few serious scenes, comic account of the Thames trip of the three friends. Wingrave is disguised in the text as "George" tout court, Hentschel as "William Samuel Harris" and Jerome as "J.". The dog, Montmorency, was an invention of Jerome's. Reviewers were not impressed by the book, finding it colloquial and vulgar. Punch dubbed Jerome "'Arry J. 'Arry". Connolly comments, "the public loved it for the very reasons that the critics loathed it: it was modern, vulgar, of the people, and written in the very way … in which people spoke". He adds, "A really funny book was as rare then as it always is, and the public valued it". It sold in prodigious numbers. Atkinson comments that the book's combination of "light-hearted satire, sharp dialogue, and slapstick has made it perennially popular, and it is the book for which Jerome is remembered". James Arrowsmith, its publisher, remarked, "I can’t imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public must eat them".