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sifting through the ‘slush pile’ in search of new authors – W. W. Jacobs among them – Jerome still maintained the pose of idleness, contributing a regular column called ‘The Idlers’ Club’ and holding regular ‘Idler at Homes’ in Arundel Street off the Strand, attended by cronies like H. G. Wells, Barrie and Conan Doyle. A year later he added to his load by taking on the editorship of a weekly magazine, Today, serializing Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Ebb Tide’ and publishing work by Hardy, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope and even Aubrey Beardsley. He was a popular and convivial figure at the Fleet Street end of the London literary spectrum; overworked as he was, he still found time for bluff, all-male gatherings of writers, politicians and theatrical folk, preferring informal and often short-lived dining-clubs like the Vagabonds or the Omar Khayyam to grander, more snobbish West End clubs.

Jerome’s career as an editor came to an end in 1897, when he was sued for libel over some footling matter by a Leeds company promoter. The plaintiff was awarded a farthing in damages, but both sides were ordered to pay their own costs. The Idler and Today closed down, and Jerome – who had recently become a father – was once again a freelance writer. Although he was to return to London after World War I, he decided to move to the country, and bought a house on the Thames, at Wallingford in Oxfordshire.

Although he received no royalties from the pirated American edition, earnings from Three Men in a Boat and his other books and plays were enough to keep the family afloat. Before long, Jerome decided to send the Three Men on their adventures again. Not surprisingly, George, Harris and J. have become stouter and more settled in the ten years since they took to the river: in Pritchett’s opinion, ‘they have lost the happy, impartial rudeness of unattached young men’. George weighs over twelve stone, has risen (like his original) to the rank of bank manager, and is still a bachelor. Harris and J. are respectable family men, with several children apiece and such trappings of worldly success as paddocks and cucumber frames. J. is making his way as a writer, and is bruised by snobbish and dismissive critics (‘You’ve been reading those criticisms again,’ Mrs J. tells him). Both Harris and J. enjoy playing the parts of henpecked husbands, and both are – by modern standards – unrepentantly old-fashioned in their views on marriage (‘In married life,’ J. explains to George, ‘the man proposes, the wife submits. It is her duty; all religion teaches it’). Defiant behind their wives’ backs, they long to get away with their men friends, but don’t quite know how to broach the matter; when Mrs J. announces that she too would like some time to herself, J. feels quite bruised and affronted. Domestic diplomacy behind them at last, they decide to make a bicycling tour of Germany; and much of the fascination of their ensuing adventures lies in Jerome’s perceptive, and disconcertingly prophetic, view of the Wilhelmine Germans as a people in whom kindliness and a passion for order are combined with passivity, a taste for brutality and authoritarian rule.

Three Men on the Bummel was published in 1900, and that same year Jerome took his family to live in Dresden. Its charms, he declared, were ‘more solidly German, and more lasting’ than those of Paris – yet another manifestation of the prevailing notion, inflamed by the Romantics and by philosophers like Nietszche and Herder, that German culture was somehow more profound and more rooted than the articulate but superficial Latin varieties. Jerome’s admiration for his hosts was reciprocated: a club was formed in his honour, and his new book became a set text in German schools.

Back in England, Jerome was at last taken seriously by the critics when Paul Kelver was published in 1902. The Times Literary Supplement compared it, favourably, with Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and suggested that although Three Men in a Boat had been the literary equivalent of a millstone round its author’s neck, his new