John Sutherland
Rowed to Success
Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K Jerome
By Carolyn W de la L Oulton
Victorian Secrets 285pp £14 order from our bookshop
The British reading public retain an inextinguishable fondness for Jerome K Jerome. Other worthy humorists of the period – Barry Pain, W W Jacobs, Eden Phillpotts, William Pett Ridge – have fallen by the way. Not so the writer with the odd, self-chosen middle name – ‘Klapka’ – whose origin remains a perennial topic of dispute among his admirers. (Any suggestions may be referred to the thriving Jerome K Jerome Society, whose president, Jeremy Nicholas, writes a warm foreword to this biography.)
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