Jerome K. Jerome

Born Jerome Klapka Jerome on May 2, 1859, in Walsall, Staffordshire, the son of an ironmonger and lay preacher whose business failures pushed the family into genteel poverty, he grew up in the East End of London amid debts and early grief. His father died when he was thirteen, his mother three years later, and at fourteen he left school to work as a railway clerk, gathering coal that fell along the tracks. He drifted through jobs as a schoolteacher, a packer, a solicitor's clerk, and a struggling actor with a touring company before turning to writing. On Stage and Off (1885) and the comic essays of The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) found an audience, but it was Three Men in a Boat (1889), conceived as a serious travel guide to the Thames and overtaken by its own humor, that made him famous, selling in the hundreds of thousands and never since out of print. He married Georgina Marris in 1888, founded and edited the magazine The Idler with Robert Barr, and produced a sequel, Three Men on the Bummel (1900), and the popular play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908). His later work turned graver, including the autobiography My Life and Times (1926). Too old to enlist in the First World War, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army, an experience that deepened the somber turn in his writing. He died on June 14, 1927, in Northampton, after a stroke suffered while returning from a motoring tour, and was buried at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, aged sixty-eight.

In 1897 his weekly To-Day accused the inventor Sampson Fox of trying to corner the market in water gas patents, and Fox sued for libel. Jerome lost the case; the jury set the damages at a single farthing, but each side paid its own costs, and his came to nine thousand pounds, so he sold his share of To-Day and The Idler to meet them.