This first appeared in serial form, as did Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow three years later. He returned penniless to London and did some reporting and schoolmastering, and then settled for a while as a solicitor’s clerk.Īll this time he was scribbling stories and plays, but it was not till 1885 that he broke into print with On the Stage and Off, an account of his theatrical adventures. For three years he travelled from theatre to assembly rooms, doubling and trebling parts – “I had to look at my costume to remind myself what part I was playing “ – and sleeping in dressing-rooms and church porches. Then, after some spare-time acting, he abandoned the railway and joined a theatrical touring company.
He was now quite alone in the world, living in a series of dingy London lodgings and working as a clerk at Euston Station (he had been to school for four years). His childhood had not been unhappy he only learned of his mother’s desperate struggles from her diary after her death. In turn her son Milton and then her husband died, and she herself died in Jerome’s arms when he was 15. His wife was of heroic Welsh Nonconformist stock and never lost her faith in spite of the ever-failing family fortune – her prayer that the price of coal might come down was, alas, never answered.
Papa Jerome Clapp Jerome (the Clapp from a Danish ancestor) was a successful preacher and church architect, and unsuccessfully a farmer at App]edore, owner of a coalmine at Walsall, and an ironmonger in London. His parents were evidently strong on names, for he had a brother, Milton Melanchthon, and two sisters, Paulina Deodata and Blandina.
Jerome Klapka Jerome was born in Walsall, taking his second name from a Hungarian general who happened to be a friend of the family. In fact his early life would have been an excellent example for his contemporary Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. One would imagine Jerome to be full of gentleness and human fellowship, and this he was and one might imagine him a rather naive man with a comfortable family background, and that he certainly was not. But that is not an uncommon literary fate.
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