John Sutherland

Rowed to Success

Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K Jerome

By

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.)

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us