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By Root 404 0

at first,’1 Jerome K. Jerome wrote of the novel by which he is best remembered – further evidence, if such were needed, that books once embarked upon acquire a life of their own, and that famous books, like famous rivers, may well have obscure or modest origins. Just turned thirty in 1889, and beginning to make his mark as an essayist and playwright, Jerome had recently returned from his honeymoon, and was living in a top-floor flat on Chelsea Embankment, the circular drawing-room of which afforded views up and down the Thames and across to Battersea Park, and the Surrey Hills beyond. Boating on the Thames had become a popular pastime in recent years, and publishers did brisk business with guidebooks-cum-histories of the river, in which topographical details were interwoven with easily digested snippets of English history; inspired by the outlook, perhaps, Jerome planned to write just such a book, the facts and figures of which would be lightened by occasional flurries of ‘humorous relief’. He decided to write these first, drawing on his own experiences of boating on the river with his friends George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, but before long the anecdotes had elbowed aside the sober slabs of history and topography, and were threatening to take over altogether. The editor of Home Chimes, where Jerome’s work was being serialized, had no time for the factual passages, and hurled most of them overboard; and when, the following year, Three Men in a Boat was published in book form, little remained of the author’s original intentions. Though cold-shouldered by the critics, the book was an instant success, making Jerome a household name and casting a long shadow over his attempts, in later life, to establish himself as a serious, even portentous, writer; and the misadventures of George, Harris, J. the narrator and the dog Montmorency remain one of the best-loved books in the language, endlessly reprinted, and filmed three times.

Some ten years later, Jerome resurrected George, Harris and J. and sent them on a bicycling tour of Germany, the results of which were published as Three Men on the Bummel – a ‘bummel’ being defined, in the last paragraph of the book, as a ‘journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started’.2 Asanaccount of Jerome’s rambling, conversational technique, this could hardly be bettered; and, quite apart from their entertainment value, both novels are wonderfully redolent of the late-Victorian and Edwardian England of Mr Pooter, the ground-down hero of the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody,3 and W. S. Gilbert’s ‘The Bab Ballads’4 and the early novels of H. G. Wells and P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City,5 of jocular clerks on the spree in plus-fours and fluorescent blazers, and men with heavy handlebar moustaches and mild suburban voices thoughtfully refilling their pipes before embarking on another yarn from the depths of a leather armchair.

‘I did not know I was a humorist,’ Jerome went on to admit – nor, indeed, had the first twenty-odd years of his life provided many occasions for mirth. His father, Jerome Clapp Jerome, was born in 1807, educated at Merchant’s Taylors School, and trained as an architect. Of ‘Puritan stock’, he soon displayed a passion for preaching, honing his technique at the Rothwell Nonconformist Academy in Northamptonshire; though never ordained, he spent a good deal of time preaching in Congregationalist chapels, several of which he also designed. In 1838 he married the daughter of a Swansea solicitor. She had been left some money, so they moved to Appledore in Devon, where Mr Clapp – as he was known to his congregation – bought a farm and preached in the local chapel, publishing a hymn book for its special use. Misled into believing that silver could be mined on his land, he spent part of his wife’s inheritance on vain attempts to bring it to the surface.

In 1855 the Jeromes moved to Walsall, in the West Midlands, where fortunes were being made from coal. Mr Jerome became