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a partner in an iron works instead, as well as building and designing the town’s Congregational chapel. When he eventually decided to try his luck with coal, and sank two pits on Cannock Chase, his efforts were thwarted by sand and underground streams; only after he had sold out did the ‘Jerome Pits’ come good, but by then his wife’s money had disappeared. Reduced to penury, they moved to Poplar, in the East End of London, where Mr Jerome tried, without success, to set up shop as an ironmonger. Despite the shortage of funds, Mrs Jerome worked hard to keep up appearances, employing a maid, just as the Pooters did, insisting that her two daughters wore gloves in public, and Mr Jerome his silk hat, and keeping her own lace and silk dresses for best. Young Jerome remembered that their house was the biggest in the street, replete with ‘china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard & Collard, and damask curtains in the windows’. It was, no doubt, a very English kind of ‘shabby gentility’.

The fourth child of the marriage, Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall in 1859: the ‘K’ stood for Klapka, the surname of an improbable-sounding 28-year-old Hungarian general who had lodged with the family while writing his memoirs. Jerome’s siblings were christened Milton Melanchton, Paulina and Blandina, and to distinguish him from his father he was referred to as ‘Luther’. This seemed apposite enough since, like many young Victorians, he was brought up on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,6 in which the roastings and disembowellings endured by heroic Protestant clergymen at the hands of Queen Mary and her diabolical Catholic henchmen were itemized in gruesome detail. Terrified by visions of Hell and Damnation, he came to regard organized religion with grave suspicion, and God Himself with a certain wariness.

Equally alarming was the East End itself. Populated, in part, by impoverished Russian and Polish Jews who had fled from tsarist pogroms, the haunt of Jack the Ripper and – according to Sherlock Holmes – dastardly Lascars and unreliable Chinese, the interminable terraces that stretched east for mile after mile from the City of London occupied, until the 1950s at least, a place in popular mythology similar to that now claimed by the most terrifying and rundown stretches of New York. ‘There is a menace, a haunting terror, that is to be found nowhere else,’ Jerome recalled. ‘The awful silence of its weary streets. The ashen faces, with their lifeless eyes that rise out of the shadows and are lost. It was these surroundings in which I passed my childhood that gave me, I suppose, my melancholy, brooding disposition.’ Although Jerome liked to think that he mixed with ‘a bad set, which included the Wesleyan minister’s two sons, also the only child of the church organist’, he was persecuted by the local urchins, who let out a great cry when they saw him coming. ‘It was not so much the blows as the jeers and taunts I fled from, spurted by mad terror,’ he remembered in My Life and Times: ‘My mother explained to me that it was because I was a gentleman.’ Looking back on his childhood in his autobiographical novel, Paul Kelver, Jerome recalled ‘hurrying through noisy, crowded thoroughfares, where flaring naptha lamps illumine fierce, patient, leadencoloured faces; through dim-lit empty streets, where monstrous shadows come and go upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow, noisesome streets, where the gutters swarm with children, and each ever-open doorway vomits riot…’ It was a world far more akin to such grim masterpieces of late-Victorian and Edwardian social realism as Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago7 and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists8 than to the benign escapism of Three Men in a Boat: it may help to explain why, though never committed to any political movement or party, Jerome instinctively sided with the underdog, and always remained uneasily aware of how thin a line separates civilized behaviour from brutality and degradation. The dead dog and the dead woman whom the three happy oarsmen encounter floating down