Below the Fairy City

Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) was the author of Three Men in a Boat, one of the best-loved books in the English language, but much of his prolific career has been left unexplored. Over a period of forty years, Jerome was variously a humourist, novelist, journalist, essayist and dramatist, leaving behind him a prodigious quantity of work, belying his famous quote I like work. It fascinates me. I could sit and look at it for hours. In this major new biography, Carolyn Oulton unearths hitherto unknown details of Jerome's early life in Walsall with his Micawberish father and God-fearing mother, and follows his momentous move to the Fairy City of London, where a formative encounter with Charles Dickens influenced his choice of profession. Although famous for his unerring ability to capture middle-class experience in comic form, Oulton also reveals Jerome's serious side as campaigner on animal rights, champion of the underdog, and fierce opponent of the New Woman. Jerome was desperate to shake off the persistent association with larking about on the Thames, but never quite achieved it in his own lifetime. Jerome K. Jerome is revealed in Oulton's book as a complex figure worthy of reassessment, with his contradictions, idiosyncrasies and, above all, his exquisite wit. This edition also includes a Foreword by Jeremy Nicholas, President of the Jerome K. Jerome Society.