Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [3]
A beneficiary of W. E. Forster’s 1870 Education Act, as a result of which some form of primary education was made available to all children for the first time, Jerome attended the Philological School in Lisson Grove, later upgraded to Marylebone Grammar School. During school holidays he visited the surrounding countryside, and years later he remembered the corn fields round Swiss Cottage, a stag hunt in Highgate, and cattle grazing in Walthamstow. For all the horrors of the East End, ‘London was a cosier place to dwell in, when I was a young man. For one thing, it was less crowded. Life was not one everlasting scrimmage.’
Jerome was twelve when his father died, revealing on his death-bed that his thick, black pelt of hair was a wig. The family moved to Finchley, and two years later Jerome left school and became the sole bread-winner. Like many others at the time, he got a job as a clerk: the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw a phenomenal rise in the number of clerks employed in offices, most of them poor, undereducated and overworked, and he took a clerical job with the London and North-Western Railway at Euston, earning ten shillings a week. The following year his mother died, and – with his brother dead, one sister married, and the other a governess in the north of England – Jerome was alone in the world. He moved into a series of digs, in one of which a fellow lodger had hanged himself.
Even at this early age, Jerome longed to be a writer, and in Paul Kelver he describes how, as a boy, he once met Dickens – or someone he assumed to be Dickens – wandering about in Hackney. ‘No man ever made money or fame but by writing his very best,’ the Dickens figure tells him. ‘If you write books thinking only of money you will be disappointed. It is easier earned in other ways.’ Young Kelver forgets to ask Dickens his name. ‘That makes me think of your future with hope,’ the novelist tells him, no doubt recognizing a kindred spirit. ‘You are an egotist, Paul; and that is the beginning of all art.’ Since Dickens died in 1870, Jerome must have been very young when and if this meeting occurred: he referred to it again in his autobiography, where the great man lets fly with ‘Oh, damn Mr Pickwick!’
When not consorting with important novelists, Jerome set out to master the worldly vices, among them smoking, drinking and girls: ‘baccy’ was to prove a lifetime’s enthusiasm, but where women were concerned, ‘To be on a footing of familiarity with a barmaid was the height of most young clerks’ ambition.’ To add variety to his life, and give himself something to write about, he involved himself with the theatre in his spare time – not something that would have pleased his Low Church parents, who regarded the theatre and its dependents with grave suspicion. He joined a repertory company, producing playbills, doing the advertising, stage-managing, and, in due course, appearing on stage himself. Eventually he gave up his job on the railways to spend nearly three years travelling round England with a touring company, leading the kind of life enjoyed by the Crummles family in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby nearly half a century earlier. It was, he wrote, a ‘jungle sort of existence’: crooked managers made off with their wages, they slept in dressing-rooms or church porches, and he ‘played every part in Hamlet save Ophelia’.
Back in London, Jerome lived rough for a while, moving on from one doss-house to another and enduring the same kind of poverty-stricken existence as his near-contemporary George Gissing. Still anxious to learn his trade as a writer, he bumped into an old friend who ‘had fallen on evil days, and had taken to journalism’. The friend suggested that he tried his luck as a Dickensian jobbing journalist, ‘penny-a-lining’ from all over London and covering fêtes, fires, court cases, coroners’ inquests, public meetings and even hangings (‘There was