Jerome Klapka Jerome

36 Newman Street, London, Middlesex

Name	Relation to Head of Family	Condition as to Marriage	Age last birthday	Rank, profession or occupation	Where born
George Crippin	Head	M	33	Equestrian Performer	London, Middlesex
Annie Crippin	Wife	M	28		London, Middlesex
Francis Crippin	Son	U	8		Brussels, Belgium (B.S.)
Edith Crippin	Daur	U	3		Plymouth, Devon
Adela Crippin	Daur	U	6m		Plymouth, Devon
Jerome Klapka Jerome	Lodger	U	21	Shorthand Writer to Solicitors etc.	Walsall, Staffs

The dreamer sits at his table, idly knocking out copy. In the house, the conversation is all about the circus, the lights, the crack of the whip. But he's bored. Twenty-one, and a clerk, marooned in an office with only the opportunity for a wry remark. He hasn't lived, even if he has at least tried the greasepaint. He wants to turn a word as skilfully as George Crippin can turn a somersault. There must be a publisher somewhere who will take his pieces.

Jerome Klapka Jerome - in later life known as 'JKJ' to his friends - wasn't exactly born with that name. But it isn't the palindromic symmetry of his name which is incorrect. His real middle name was, more mundanely, Clapp. At the time of JKJ's birth, on May 2nd, 1859, his father was also Jerome Clapp Jerome, but this too was an untruth. His father had been born plain Jerome Clapp, and had been mostly known as Clapp, a common Devonian surname. JKJ was the fourth child; he had two much elder sisters, both of them born with the surname Clapp, although their first names had the characteristic extravagance of parents who liked nothing better than to rifle through descriptions of minor saints and martyrs. Jerome Clapp had married Marguerette Maine Jones in 1842; her father had been a Swansea draper, his a silversmith in Bath; the couple married in Bideford, in North Devon. Their first daughter was Paulina Deodata Clapp, born in 1845; their second, born in 1848, was Blandina Dominica Clapp. Having ditched the Clapp, they saved up something even more spectacular for their third child, a son born in 1855, and given the alliterative double-whammy of Milton Melancthon Jerome.

When Jerome the younger was an infant, the family had a lodger, a Hungarian general called György Klapka, who was busy writing his memoirs. It is not known how a veteran of the Hungarian rising in the late 1840s came to be living in Walsall; but his name was snaffled by Jerome the elder and Marguerette, and grafted over their last son's middle C. Quite how much of this the future author of Three Men In A Boat knew about all this is unclear. He seems to have accepted the Klapka with ease; and besides, his parents had already begun, to distinguish between the two Jeromes by calling the younger one "Luther". (Martin Luther's closest sixteenth-century colleague was Philipp Melancthon. Melancthon and Luther. It was a cumbersome, non-conformist joke).

In later life, Jerome K. Jerome was claimed by Walsall as their favourite son, but it was a close run thing. His father was an architect by profession who had devoted himself to an itinerant vocation as an independent (and popular) Congregationalist minister, progressing by stages from Marlborough to Cirencester; to Appledore in North Devon; and only then to the Midlands. His wife's inheritance smoothed his way, but Jerome the elder now wrecked the family finances twice over. His first venture was a barely profitable iron works; his second was to purchase two colliery shafts, which never reached the stage of producing coal, and which emptied the Jerome account. He broke the news to his wife on JKJ's first birthday. While the family moved to a smaller house in Stourbridge, JKJ's father set off for London to repair the financial damage. He started a wholesale ironmongery business at Limehouse; while he was away, his son Milton died, aged 6, of croup. Only now did Marguerette discover the dire circumstances in which her husband was working; she upped sticks, and, aged four, Walsall's future jewel was heading for the rougher end of Poplar with his mother and teenage sisters. The pit - which retained the name Jerome itself - subsequently proved to be highly lucrative.

Jerome grew up in a pious, straitened family, in an area he later recalled with quiet horror:

about the East End of London there is a menace, a haunting terror that is found nowhere else. The awful silence of its weary streets. The ashen faces, with their lifeless eyes that rise out of the shadows and are lost.

Paulina - known as Pauline - married in 1866, incidentally as Pauline Clapp; Blandina, who took the new surname, became a governess. Jerome - Luther - passed an entrance test to a school in Marylebone, which involved a two-hour trip in each direction. He hated school; but the journey gave him a season ticket with which he could wander in the holidays. On one trip through Victoria Park, aged ten or eleven, Jerome met Charles Dickens, or so he believed: Dickens did not divulge his name. After admitting that he wished to write, and being advised to "write his best", the gentleman he had met asked what he thought of "Mr. Dickens". Jerome admitted to admiring the comedy best - as in Pickwick. "Oh damn Mr. Pickwick!" retorted the famous writer, before melting into the evening.

There was a happier interlude. Pauline's husband was a Robert Shorland (their son Frank was later a famous bicyclist, and Jerome enjoyed the kudos of being "Shorland's uncle"), and now the Shorlands moved four miles out to the countryside, to Colney Hatch (best known at the time, as it happens, for its lunatic asylum). Jerome's family followed. JKJ came alive. But his father, who had been ailing, finally succumbed. It was 1872. Only by the deathbed did JKJ realise his father had worn a black wig. Three years later, his mother also died. He was fifteen; he was alone with her when it happened, Blandina having taken a job in Norfolk, with a wealthy family called Brown.

JKJ shifted from occupation to occupation, restless and ill-at-ease, beginning to use his spare time to send off (and receive back) countless stories. Living in a succession of cheap lodgings, he had, in turn, spells as a railway clerk; a factotum in Euston's advertising department; a sudden and exciting shift into the shabby world of the theatre, which lasted two years; a spell as as a penny-a-liner, a freelance journalism that consisted of accumulating as much trivia as possible for insertion in a local newspaper. He did well, driven by fear of the destitution he had witnessed (he had had a fair spell in the doss-houses before turning to this quickfire writing). He taught at a school for a term; kept the accounts for an illiterate builder; worked as a commission agent; as a parliamentary agent; and, by 1881, had wound up at a solicitor's office. He enjoyed the absurdity of the ancient papers and obscure claims, and loathed the drudgery. At the time of the census, he was lodging with a circus artist (Crippin) who performed as George Delevanti, a tumbler who was famous for leaping through a series of hoops, and performing flips on horseback. At the time, Crippin was performing with Hengler's Circus. The contrast between the scratch of the solicitor's quill and the roar of Delevanti's applause must have seemed considerable.

Jerome K. Jerome in the 1880s

But within a few years, JKJ's fortunes had themselves somersaulted into success. After a tediously persistent stream of rejections, a miserable romance he had written was accepted by a soon-to-be-defunct magazine, The Lamp . He had made friends, too, in some new, nearby digs with George Wingrave, a banker's clerk with whom he shared a room, and with whom he was soon to share a boat, in fact as in fiction. His break came with the acceptance of some short, comic pieces about the theatre, which were accepted by a new magazine called The Play (he sold them for the first fiver he'd ever seen), and, in 1885, published in book form by Field & Tuer. A year later, a sequence of articles on "idling", light, cheeky pieces about doing nothing with panache, were published as The Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow. The good news was that it quickly sold 15,000 copies; in America, it sold in six figures. The bad news was that he only received £150, and nothing for the American editions, which were pirated. Nevertheless, his name was prospering. He had a circle of friends which included JM Barrie and Carl Henstschel, the latter to be the Third Man in the Boat. JKJ was no longer lying when he wrote to his sisters that he was doing well. In 1886 or 1887, he also fell in love - with a married woman, Georgina "Ettie" Marris, the daughter of a Spanish officer called Nesza, and the wife of a London chemist. Ettie had a daughter, too, a five-year-old called Elsie. Nine days after her divorce came through - she had filed it - JKJ married her. He never referred in print to her previous marriage; nor did he refer, incidentally, to Elsie. At about the same time, he took another plunge - he left the clerical life to become a full-time writer. He thought there might be a book in describing a trip up the Thames with George and Carl ("Harris").

Three Men In A Boat cemented the reputation of JKJ - by now known in the trade as 'Arry K 'Arry. Its success owes much to its editor; JKJ's original plan was to write a historical account of the river, The Story Of The Thames , but the editor of the magazine, Home Chimes , in which it was serialised, filleted the material brilliantly. It sold and sold and sold; it out-did the various, forgettable plays he wrote at the same time. It was sniped at by the critics, too. For the rest of his career, he was damned as a humorist if he tried to write a serious novel (his main aim), or belittled as a jobbing journalist if he produced the cheery, lightweight classics which were his forte.

JKJ's next career move was to accept the editorship of a mildly satirical monthly. JKJ suggested The Idler as a title. His wit and personality infused it, and drew writers to it, including Conan Doyle; he turned out to be an astute talent-spotter, and, by the time he had begun, concurrently, to edit - and own - another magazine, To-Day , his list of contributors was stellar. Kipling. Hardy. Anthony Hope. Gissing. Ambrose Bierce. The Jeromes, who had moved to Alpha Place in St. John's Wood, numbered W.S. Gilbert and H.G. Wells, Eden Philpotts and Rider Haggard amongst their visitors. Soon the Jeromes advanced, Monopoly-like, to Mayfair. He published an autobiographical novel, Paul Kelver , to some critical acclaim. At which point, a sort of nemesis arrived in the form of a libel law-suit against To-day 's business column. As with modern Private Eye cases, the lawyers must have rubbed their thumbs and fingers in delight. The businessman who felt he had been libelled, Samson Fox, won a pyrrhic victory - one farthing. But both sides had costs to pay, and Jerome's were a ruinous £9,000. He had to sell his interests in both magazines. Jerome was to spend most of the rest of his career recouping the loss. He had been lucky to have established his popularity so quickly. And by now, he had a daughter of his own, Rowena (born in 1898): one who absorbed him, it would seem, more than the stepchild, Elsie, he had inherited.

JKJ continued to produce novels, articles, lectures - including three trips to America - and plays, one of which, The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1910), survived the usual critical pasting to be revived regularly over the next twenty years. In this and other plays, his daughter Rowena made appearances as an actress. In World War I, Jerome, at the age of fifty-five, signed up with the French army as an ambulance driver; after a year, he returned, and spoke out against the conflict ("Those who talk about war being a game ought to be made to go out and play it"). He was equally vociferous in his attacks on the violent racism he witnessed in the USA.

During the 1920s, JKJ divided his time between London and the country, continuing to rise at 6.30 and write. He produced his autobiography in 1926, and succumbed to the blandishments of Walsall's civic dignitaries, finally returning in February 1927 for "Jerome Day", in which the town came to a happy standstill to welcome their only famous son. Within four months, after driving happily - he enjoyed driving - from London to Devon, Devon to Gloucestershire, and then to a Northampton hotel, where he had a stroke from which he never recovered. He lingered lucidly for a fortnight in Northampton's General Hospital; and died on June 14th 1927, at the age of sixty-eight.

Long before his death, JKJ had purchased a burial plot in Ewelme, Oxfordshire, by the Thames, and his sister Blandina had been buried there as far back as 1904; his stepdaughter Elsie had died in 1921, and was buried there with her husband. Among those at his funeral were George and Carl, the other two men on the boat (not to mention the dog - because Montmorency was a fiction). One by one the other family members - Ettie and Rowena (who died in 1966, unmarried) - were also buried there.

Jerome K. Jerome was painted in the 1880s by Solomon J. Solomon, who also died in 1927, at about the same age. The portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Solomon's name is not an invention.

Notes:

Jerome wrote seven novels, twenty-five plays, seventeen collections of short stories or articles, besides other uncollected essays and his autobiography. In his autobiography, he suggests that his mother's father was a prosperous Swansea solicitor. This wasn't the case. It may be that the wealth came from a generation further back, or perhaps an uncle. As the youngest child, he seems to have been confused about his parents. Nor is it clear on what date Klapka replaced Clapp as the middle name - the 1871 census shows him clearly as Jerome C. Jerome.

Sources:

My Life And Times, by Jerome K. Jerome, Hodder & Stoughton, 1926

Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography, by Joseph Connolly, Orbis, 1982

Jerome K. Jerome, by Ruth Marie Faurot, Twayne, 1974

Jerome K. Jerome, by Alfred Moss, Selwyn & Blount, 1928

The Jerome K. Jerome Society

top