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and F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny, and its effects were infinitely more widespread.’ Some of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in Tit-Bits, as well as in the Strand Magazine, and although the serialization of novels was a well-established Victorian tradition, the novel itself was not immune to the challenges presented by new markets and new readers. The bulky and expensive three-decker novel, beloved of the great Victorians and of Mudie’s Lending Library,12 gave way, in part, to shorter, more accessible works; the middlebrow bestseller became a staple of the publishing business, selling in huge quantities to homebound commuters from W. H. Smith’s13 railway bookstalls. Jerome was typical of this new mass readership, and in due course Three Men in a Boat, itself a bestseller, would be denounced by the literary establishment for its ‘vulgarity’ and for the ‘colloquial clerks’ English’ in which it was written. But, as Carey points out, ‘Jerome was consciously wooing a new readership: the perky clerks and shop assistants, the Mr Pollys14 and Lupin Pooters,15 whose stripy blazers and half-starved features still gaze triumphantly from a thousand photographs,’ and although ‘the genteel highbrows of the next generation – Forster, Virginia Woolf, Eliot – were to sneer at this whole breed, clerks were Jerome’s class, and he liked them – especially the jaunty, stoical way they took life’s knocks’. When, early in the next century, the right-wing poet T. W. H. Crosland savaged the clerking classes and all they stood for in his polemic The Suburbans, he noted that Wells, Shaw and Jerome, all of whom had worked as clerks, were the favourite authors of those he most despised.

But before any of this could take place, Jerome had to find his way into print. It proved a long, dispiriting business, with evenings given over to writing after a tiring day in a solicitor’s office, and the amassing of a hefty wodge of rejection letters. In the end The Lamp accepted a story, and the author of another magazine handed a dazed Jerome five pounds in exchange for something he had written. Persistence had paid off at last, and before long Jerome was writing ‘Idle Thoughts’ for F. W. Robinson’s Home Chimes, fellow-contributors to which included Mark Twain, Algernon Charles Swinburne and J. M. Barrie,16 who was soon to become a close friend. (An affectation of idleness was to become one of Jerome’s leitmotifs: as V. S. Pritchett remarked, hard-working and browbeaten clerks – all of whom, like George, worked on Saturdays until lunchtime, as well as long hours during the week – liked to pose as men of leisure and to ‘regard idleness as a joke’,17 and J. tells us that he and his fellow-oarsmen all affect a ‘general disinclination to work of any kind’.)

Published in 1885, Jerome’s first book, On the Stage – and Off, drew on his theatrical experiences. It was followed a year later by The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, in which he established a recognizable and distinctive tone of voice: colloquial, discursive, both fanciful and commonsensical. Dedicated, at some length, to his pipe, it consisted of ruminative, mildly humorous essays on unalarming, everyday subjects – ‘On Being Shy’, ‘On Being Hard-Up’, ‘Getting on in the World’, ‘Cats and Dogs’ – served up with rueful, rather resigned nuggets of worldly wisdom such as might have been accompanied, if spoken, by some sagacious knocking out or tamping of the pipe. It was a genre of belles-lettres that lay in a direct line of descent from the essays of Addison and Charles Lamb, flourished in Edwardian England, reached its nadir in The Times fourth leaders, and was mercilessly ridiculed by Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise. Idle Thoughts was dismissed by the critics, who derided Jerome as ’Arry K. ’Arry, and an example of the ‘new humorist’ at his worst. ‘The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; the Morning Post as an example of the sad results to be expected of the over-education of the lower orders’ – but it sold over 20,000 copies in Britain, and did well in America too.

Life