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My Life and Times
Jerome K. Jerome struggled against poverty and obscurity, not to mention his improbable name, for many years before “Three Men In A Boat” made him a celebrity, and the friend of other celebrities. A man of deep human sympathies and principles, he lived through, and engaged with, a time - like our own - of unprecedented changes and inventions, most of which are commonplace now. Much of his writing, especially for the theatre, has now been forgotten but a year before his death, in 1927, he published his autobiography, in the popular style he pioneered - still in daily use by journalists.
Brian Wright was born in the East End and after Oxford went on to RADA. After several years in repertory, the RSC, and West End, he began writing as well as acting. His writing has won two Sony Awards, a BAFTA nomination and a fellowship at Bristol University. His books, The Canal Children and Penge Papers are published by Heinemann, Souvenir and Pan. His solo performance, Black Snow, was presented at the Edinburgh and Cheltenham Festivals and on BBC radio and his solo performance, Shaking Spears for Shakespeare is still touring.
Brian Wright was born in the East End and after Oxford went on to RADA. After several years in repertory, the RSC, and West End, he began writing as well as acting. His writing has won two Sony Awards, a BAFTA nomination and a fellowship at Bristol University. His books, The Canal Children and Penge Papers are published by Heinemann, Souvenir and Pan. His solo performance, Black Snow, was presented at the Edinburgh and Cheltenham Festivals and on BBC radio and his solo performance, Shaking Spears for Shakespeare is still touring.
318 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
7 people are currently reading
127 people want to read
About the author
Jerome K. Jerome
857 books1,355 followersJerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He married in 1888, and the honeymoon was spent on a boat on the River Thames; he published Three Men in a Boat soon afterwards. He continued to write fiction, non-fiction and plays over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 5, 2022
This was a good autobiography and I found myself quite liking Jerome by the end of it. He is quite selective in what he writes about, there is virtually nothing about his wife and children. he choses to focus on his early life and his professional life. His language is of the time, but some of his views feel quite modern.
This was more a series of anecdotes and comments. He describes the grinding poverty of his childhood and its intensely religious nature. He describes his feelings as a child dealing with the particular brand of hellfire Christianity he was exposed to. Jerome explains his fear, as a child of commiting the unforgiveable sin; reminding me of times when I experienced exactly the same feelings over the same issue. Jerome writes eloquently about religious fundamentalism and his battles with it. He did find his own way back to a more humane type of religious faith and the last chapter is his case for his faith.
Jerome tells anecdotes of his early poverty as a young man in London, when he often slept rough or lived in very basic conditions. Once he started earning from writing he became part of literary society and shamelessly namedrops. His friends included J M Barrie, Conan Doyle, Wells, Shaw, Gilbert, Sarah Bernhardt and so on. He tells some amusing anecdotes about all of them and especially about the rise of the bicycle.
Jerome comes across sometimes as a fairly jolly humourist. Two things changed that for me:
Firstly, he went to America in the very early 1900s. Amidst the merry anecdotes Jerome talks about a reading he gave in Chattanooga. He had become concerned about the lynchings that were taking place in the South at the time. Two days before he arrived in Chattanooga two black men had been lynched for an alleged attack on a white woman (untrue as it happens). Jerome felt strongly about this and told the assembled worthies who had come to hear him speak exactly what he thought about the lynchings; he describes the reaction thus;
"... it seemed to be that I could actually visualise the anger of my audience. It looked like a dull Copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing in size. I sat down amid silence,"
It was a brave thing to do. Jerome suggested that that more Americans should speak out about the "foul sin" in their midst.
Secondly, Jerome's war record. By the time of the First World War Jerome was in his 50s. He still volunteered as an ambulance driver/stretcher bearer, The British refused to have him because of his age. He therefore joined the French Army as an amulance driver as their restrictions only related to fitness. He served as an ambulance driver and stretcher bearer for two years. He went into no mans land and saw some of the worst of the horrors, as a volunteer helping the wounded.
I would have liked to have known Jerome, he came across as a decent man
This was more a series of anecdotes and comments. He describes the grinding poverty of his childhood and its intensely religious nature. He describes his feelings as a child dealing with the particular brand of hellfire Christianity he was exposed to. Jerome explains his fear, as a child of commiting the unforgiveable sin; reminding me of times when I experienced exactly the same feelings over the same issue. Jerome writes eloquently about religious fundamentalism and his battles with it. He did find his own way back to a more humane type of religious faith and the last chapter is his case for his faith.
Jerome tells anecdotes of his early poverty as a young man in London, when he often slept rough or lived in very basic conditions. Once he started earning from writing he became part of literary society and shamelessly namedrops. His friends included J M Barrie, Conan Doyle, Wells, Shaw, Gilbert, Sarah Bernhardt and so on. He tells some amusing anecdotes about all of them and especially about the rise of the bicycle.
Jerome comes across sometimes as a fairly jolly humourist. Two things changed that for me:
Firstly, he went to America in the very early 1900s. Amidst the merry anecdotes Jerome talks about a reading he gave in Chattanooga. He had become concerned about the lynchings that were taking place in the South at the time. Two days before he arrived in Chattanooga two black men had been lynched for an alleged attack on a white woman (untrue as it happens). Jerome felt strongly about this and told the assembled worthies who had come to hear him speak exactly what he thought about the lynchings; he describes the reaction thus;
"... it seemed to be that I could actually visualise the anger of my audience. It looked like a dull Copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing in size. I sat down amid silence,"
It was a brave thing to do. Jerome suggested that that more Americans should speak out about the "foul sin" in their midst.
Secondly, Jerome's war record. By the time of the First World War Jerome was in his 50s. He still volunteered as an ambulance driver/stretcher bearer, The British refused to have him because of his age. He therefore joined the French Army as an amulance driver as their restrictions only related to fitness. He served as an ambulance driver and stretcher bearer for two years. He went into no mans land and saw some of the worst of the horrors, as a volunteer helping the wounded.
I would have liked to have known Jerome, he came across as a decent man
May 20, 2020
A friend recently asked me this: if I could nominate five books by English authors for the school syllabus, which would I pick, and why? I gave my answer, and of all my book choices, only one met with outright disbelief. This was it.
Why that should be is unfortunate, but then again misfortune stuck to the author of Three Men in a Boat like tar. Jerome Klapka Jerome – the original family surname was Clapp – was born in Walsall on the May 2nd 1859. His Father owned some of the first coal mines sunk on Cannock Chase, at the start of the Staffordshire coal boom. Booms, alas, are followed by busts; soon Father sat himself on the edge of Mother’s bed to break to her, as gently as possible, the not unexpected news that he was ruined.
Soon the family moved, and then moved, again, this time to London. Victorian London terrified the young Jerome. The impressions it left, you feel, marked him for life:
‘Grim poverty lurks close to its fine thoroughfares, and there are sad, sordid streets within its wealthiest quarters. But about the East End of London there is a menace, a haunting terror that is to be found nowhere else. The awful silence of its weary streets. The ashen faces, with their lifeless eyes that rise out of shadows and are lost. It was these surroundings in which I passed my childhood that gave to me, I suppose, my melancholy, brooding disposition. I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.’
He was not proven wrong. At age fourteen, his Father died; his Mother followed only two years later. On each anniversary of the death of Jerome’s little brother, his Mother would confide in her diary that she was a year closer to seeing her son again. The last entry was written ten days before her own death. It read: ‘Dear Milton’s birthday. It can be now but a little while longer. I wonder if he will have changed.’
Parentless, he got a job working for the LNWR at Euston, coming home every evening to empty digs where desolation would strike him like a fist to the stomach. He later joined a travelling theatre company, acting every part in Hamlet, he says, bar Ophelia.
On one occasion he played three parts – a soldier, a shepherd, and a priest – and they talked so much alike he had to look at his clothes to make sure which he was playing. What he also didn’t know was how the managers would regularly pocket the takings, leaving their actors to hitchhike home. Before he was twenty, Jerome was broke and sleeping in doss-houses.
Fortunately for him and us, a fluke landed him a job as a jobbing journalist – his rate was three-halfpence a line - which he supplemented by clerking. As well as acquiring the skills to write, he also gained a clear sense of who to write for, and not from the distanced perspective of the monied. There was a new and growing readership in England and Jerome was ideally placed to capture its attention. After all, he was part of it.
There were plenty of newspapers to woo them. Even if most of them died young, they were all hungry for copy. Jerome trained himself to write for them with impressive resourcefulness. Portland Place, with its ‘spacious dignity’ was his ideal place to work. Notebook and pencil in hand, he would stop under each lamppost to jot down a sentence or phrase he had just thought of. Suspicious policemen would approach him, asking him precisely what he was doing – and so became his first audience. Eventually, they grew friendly. One difficult Inspector, a grizzled old Scot who ‘always reached Langham church as the clock struck eleven’ left in stitches: whenever he made him laugh, Jerome reflects, he went home feeling he had done a good day's work.
Even modest success did not come easily. His work went to The Argosy, Temple Bar, Tinsley’s Magazine and, finally, to a penny paper called The Play which had just started. Four days later, he received his first acceptance.(‘Dear Sir, I like your articles very much. Can you call on me to-morrow before twelve?’) Jerome didn’t sleep that night. His pay improved, though not much – his best early essays, later collected in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, paid a guinea each. Publishing them in book form was not easy, or inevitable.
For all else that has changed since Jerome’s time, his depiction of English publishers (‘as dense as editors’) seems hauntingly familiar. Most of them were happy to explain to him, at wearying length, how pernicious and unprofitable the book trade was for all concerned. Some thought the book might be quite successful if only its author was willing to give up on trivial concerns like copyrights. The book sold surprisingly well for a book of essays. Thanks, in part, to a light yellow cover that stood out on the bookstalls, twenty-three editions (of one thousand copies each) were sold before the end of the year, and Jerome was receiving a royalty of twopence halfpenny a copy.
Again, the good news-bad news. By Jerome’s calculation, his worst misfortune in life – which was saying a lot – was being born six years too soon, or, rather, ‘that America’s conscience, on the subject of literary copyright, awoke in her bosom six years too late for me.’ The book sold handsomely in the land of the free, but largely in pirated editions.
Unsurprisingly, Jerome started his first novel with dark intentions: a firm believer in original sin, if not the literal truth of the Bible, he intended to show how ‘The one thing certain is that mankind remains a race of low intelligence and evil instincts.’ But that was not how things turned out, and his talent had more in store for him than he realised. If he laughed to stop himself crying, that didn’t make the laughter any less genuine. The public agreed and swiftly turned the book he eventually produced, Three Men in a Boat, into a bestseller.
Critics of the time hated the novel and, like the Bloomsbury set that followed decades later, hated its author even more. Most authors fancy themselves martyrs, but Jerome wasn’t exaggerating when he said he became the most abused penman in England. His ‘vulgarity’ and clear, flippant style (‘clerk’s English’) were attacked mercilessly. One critic, writing in the Morning Post, held him up as the inevitable consequence of 'over-educating the lower orders.'
For the first time in his life, Jerome had money, an editorship of his own, and was able to travel. He enjoyed Germany, as later reflected in Three Men on the Bummel. America and its citizenry impressed him less. One American told him how the Swiss alps would be so much more extensive if only they were rolled out flat.
American’s main problem, as Jerome saw it, was its obsession with its own bigness. Of New York: ‘it is Business Triumphant that towers to Heaven, dominating, unchallenged. The skyscraper alone is visible. Religion, art: they have their hiding places, round its feet.’ He remembers a girl of twelve, whose Father had invested five thousand dollars into her account. After considering how to invest it, the child answered: ‘if, as the paper says, there is going to be a famine in Russia this winter, hadn’t I better put it into wheat?’ The Father kissed her. ‘I’ll fix it up for you in the morning.’
But what he detested most about America was its blatant racism. Arriving in Chattanooga, he learned that two black men had been lynched only days before his arrival on the charge of assaulting a white woman: proved afterwards, as usual, to have been a trumped-up lie. Lynching fever pervaded the South; there were times when he could almost visualise the anger of the crowds, ‘like a dull, copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing in size.’
Jerome is worth quoting at length on the subject:
‘I have sat men with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roasted alive; told how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inward as the flames crept up till nothing could be seen but two white balls. These things are organised by the town’s “leading citizens”. Well-dressed women crowd to the show, children are lifted upon their fathers’ shoulders. The Law, represented by grinning policemen, stands idly by. Preachers from their pulpits glorify these things, and tell their congregations that God approves. The Southern press roars its encouragement. Hangings, shootings would be terrible enough. These burnings; these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pinchers can be only to glut some hideous lust of cruelty.’
If the book were to appear for the first time today, it might quickly take place in the ‘tragic life story’ section. That would be a grave mistake. Jerome had more cause than most to cry but instead chose to laugh and made generations of readers do the same. Far more than that, this book deftly summons up its milieu – the naptha lamps, the hansom cabs, the drink, the snobbery and the comradeship - like few others. It is funny and fearful, economic and exact, and places the reader into a world they did not live through more than any other book I know.
That’s why.
Why that should be is unfortunate, but then again misfortune stuck to the author of Three Men in a Boat like tar. Jerome Klapka Jerome – the original family surname was Clapp – was born in Walsall on the May 2nd 1859. His Father owned some of the first coal mines sunk on Cannock Chase, at the start of the Staffordshire coal boom. Booms, alas, are followed by busts; soon Father sat himself on the edge of Mother’s bed to break to her, as gently as possible, the not unexpected news that he was ruined.
Soon the family moved, and then moved, again, this time to London. Victorian London terrified the young Jerome. The impressions it left, you feel, marked him for life:
‘Grim poverty lurks close to its fine thoroughfares, and there are sad, sordid streets within its wealthiest quarters. But about the East End of London there is a menace, a haunting terror that is to be found nowhere else. The awful silence of its weary streets. The ashen faces, with their lifeless eyes that rise out of shadows and are lost. It was these surroundings in which I passed my childhood that gave to me, I suppose, my melancholy, brooding disposition. I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.’
He was not proven wrong. At age fourteen, his Father died; his Mother followed only two years later. On each anniversary of the death of Jerome’s little brother, his Mother would confide in her diary that she was a year closer to seeing her son again. The last entry was written ten days before her own death. It read: ‘Dear Milton’s birthday. It can be now but a little while longer. I wonder if he will have changed.’
Parentless, he got a job working for the LNWR at Euston, coming home every evening to empty digs where desolation would strike him like a fist to the stomach. He later joined a travelling theatre company, acting every part in Hamlet, he says, bar Ophelia.
On one occasion he played three parts – a soldier, a shepherd, and a priest – and they talked so much alike he had to look at his clothes to make sure which he was playing. What he also didn’t know was how the managers would regularly pocket the takings, leaving their actors to hitchhike home. Before he was twenty, Jerome was broke and sleeping in doss-houses.
Fortunately for him and us, a fluke landed him a job as a jobbing journalist – his rate was three-halfpence a line - which he supplemented by clerking. As well as acquiring the skills to write, he also gained a clear sense of who to write for, and not from the distanced perspective of the monied. There was a new and growing readership in England and Jerome was ideally placed to capture its attention. After all, he was part of it.
There were plenty of newspapers to woo them. Even if most of them died young, they were all hungry for copy. Jerome trained himself to write for them with impressive resourcefulness. Portland Place, with its ‘spacious dignity’ was his ideal place to work. Notebook and pencil in hand, he would stop under each lamppost to jot down a sentence or phrase he had just thought of. Suspicious policemen would approach him, asking him precisely what he was doing – and so became his first audience. Eventually, they grew friendly. One difficult Inspector, a grizzled old Scot who ‘always reached Langham church as the clock struck eleven’ left in stitches: whenever he made him laugh, Jerome reflects, he went home feeling he had done a good day's work.
Even modest success did not come easily. His work went to The Argosy, Temple Bar, Tinsley’s Magazine and, finally, to a penny paper called The Play which had just started. Four days later, he received his first acceptance.(‘Dear Sir, I like your articles very much. Can you call on me to-morrow before twelve?’) Jerome didn’t sleep that night. His pay improved, though not much – his best early essays, later collected in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, paid a guinea each. Publishing them in book form was not easy, or inevitable.
For all else that has changed since Jerome’s time, his depiction of English publishers (‘as dense as editors’) seems hauntingly familiar. Most of them were happy to explain to him, at wearying length, how pernicious and unprofitable the book trade was for all concerned. Some thought the book might be quite successful if only its author was willing to give up on trivial concerns like copyrights. The book sold surprisingly well for a book of essays. Thanks, in part, to a light yellow cover that stood out on the bookstalls, twenty-three editions (of one thousand copies each) were sold before the end of the year, and Jerome was receiving a royalty of twopence halfpenny a copy.
Again, the good news-bad news. By Jerome’s calculation, his worst misfortune in life – which was saying a lot – was being born six years too soon, or, rather, ‘that America’s conscience, on the subject of literary copyright, awoke in her bosom six years too late for me.’ The book sold handsomely in the land of the free, but largely in pirated editions.
Unsurprisingly, Jerome started his first novel with dark intentions: a firm believer in original sin, if not the literal truth of the Bible, he intended to show how ‘The one thing certain is that mankind remains a race of low intelligence and evil instincts.’ But that was not how things turned out, and his talent had more in store for him than he realised. If he laughed to stop himself crying, that didn’t make the laughter any less genuine. The public agreed and swiftly turned the book he eventually produced, Three Men in a Boat, into a bestseller.
Critics of the time hated the novel and, like the Bloomsbury set that followed decades later, hated its author even more. Most authors fancy themselves martyrs, but Jerome wasn’t exaggerating when he said he became the most abused penman in England. His ‘vulgarity’ and clear, flippant style (‘clerk’s English’) were attacked mercilessly. One critic, writing in the Morning Post, held him up as the inevitable consequence of 'over-educating the lower orders.'
For the first time in his life, Jerome had money, an editorship of his own, and was able to travel. He enjoyed Germany, as later reflected in Three Men on the Bummel. America and its citizenry impressed him less. One American told him how the Swiss alps would be so much more extensive if only they were rolled out flat.
American’s main problem, as Jerome saw it, was its obsession with its own bigness. Of New York: ‘it is Business Triumphant that towers to Heaven, dominating, unchallenged. The skyscraper alone is visible. Religion, art: they have their hiding places, round its feet.’ He remembers a girl of twelve, whose Father had invested five thousand dollars into her account. After considering how to invest it, the child answered: ‘if, as the paper says, there is going to be a famine in Russia this winter, hadn’t I better put it into wheat?’ The Father kissed her. ‘I’ll fix it up for you in the morning.’
But what he detested most about America was its blatant racism. Arriving in Chattanooga, he learned that two black men had been lynched only days before his arrival on the charge of assaulting a white woman: proved afterwards, as usual, to have been a trumped-up lie. Lynching fever pervaded the South; there were times when he could almost visualise the anger of the crowds, ‘like a dull, copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing in size.’
Jerome is worth quoting at length on the subject:
‘I have sat men with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roasted alive; told how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inward as the flames crept up till nothing could be seen but two white balls. These things are organised by the town’s “leading citizens”. Well-dressed women crowd to the show, children are lifted upon their fathers’ shoulders. The Law, represented by grinning policemen, stands idly by. Preachers from their pulpits glorify these things, and tell their congregations that God approves. The Southern press roars its encouragement. Hangings, shootings would be terrible enough. These burnings; these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pinchers can be only to glut some hideous lust of cruelty.’
If the book were to appear for the first time today, it might quickly take place in the ‘tragic life story’ section. That would be a grave mistake. Jerome had more cause than most to cry but instead chose to laugh and made generations of readers do the same. Far more than that, this book deftly summons up its milieu – the naptha lamps, the hansom cabs, the drink, the snobbery and the comradeship - like few others. It is funny and fearful, economic and exact, and places the reader into a world they did not live through more than any other book I know.
That’s why.
April 15, 2024
«Артур Мейчен в юності мав вигляд інтелектуала і я не знаю жодного письменника, який був би йому рівнею в умінні нагнітати атмосферу невимовного жаху. Якось я дав Конан Дойлу його книгу про трьох обманщиків. Дойл не спав усю ніч:
- Ваш приятель Мейчен дійсно геній, - сказав він мені наступного дня, - але з собою в ліжко я його більше не візьму!»
Джером Клапка Джером «Моє життя і часи»
Я узяла з собою в ліжко Джерома К. Джерома коли оце захворіла і не пошкодувала. Мій улюблений письменник - цей сумний сивий пан з непростим життям і тонким почуттям гумору. Скільки разів я прочитала його короткі оповідання і «Троє у човні»! Досі памʼятаю, як в гостинці на Новобіличах читала мамі вголос товстезну книгу, частково згризену нашим папугою. Коли ми дійшли до того моменту, як троє друзів, збираючись в подорож на човні, намагались запхати масло в чайник, а згодом в процесі пакування і взагалі його загубили, в нас почались судоми і по щоках вже просто текли сльози. Це та книжка, яку треба читати вголос.
Тож я лягла «боліть» із гумористом. Я взагалі спогади про те, «як було колись» люблю чи не найбільше з усіх інших жанрів літератури, а ще й від такого оповідача, як Джером, це ж обше! Тому якщо вам цікаво, я дещо перекажу, бо ж українською ці мемуари не переклали.
Часи Джерома - це коли паби зустрічались на кожному кроці, на тверезу людину на вулиці озирались з подивом, а пʼяні діти були цілком звичним явищем. Тоді зими в Лондоні були такі сніжні, що по мосту неможливо було пройти, поки двірники не розчистять стежки, залізниці лише починали підкорювати високі гори, а гольф захоплював зелені галявини, так що коням не було вже де проїхати.
Дитинст��о письменника було дуже бідним. Він мріяв так розбагатіти, щоб не замислюючись купити квиток на омнібус і ней йти пішки. Та нудну контору юний Джером покинув, захопившись театральним життям і яскравою сценою. В нього виходило добре. В «Гамлеті» він зіграв усі ролі окрім Офелії, а в «Мазепі» по Байрону Джером грав аж за трьох - пастуха, солдата і священника. Головну роль, власне романтичного героя Мазепу, грала кремезна акторка Лайза Вебер у такому відвертому костюмі, якого в Лондоні тоді ще не бачили, тож в театрі придумали поставити прямо під сценою особливі стільці за окрему ціну і гроші текли рікою. В якийсь момент цієї вистави Джером з колегою мали відвʼязувати Мазепу від коня і з трудом тягнути в інший кінець сцени, поки акторка пошепки проклинала їх і обіцяла різні кари, якщо вони її впустять. Вона їм так набридла, що одного разу вони вирішили впустити її в оркестрову яму, добряче перед тим розгойдавши.
Ох, які пристрасті і шкандалі чаїть в собі театральне закулісся! Наприклад, дружбу всього життя може перекреслити питання, чи повинен актор, який збирається освідчитись у коханні, зробити три кроки вліво і стати в центрі сцени, беручись за стілець лівою рукою, чи його почуття можуть розкритись лише тоді, коли він стоїть навколішки перед каміном, спираючись лівим ліктем на камінну полицю? Ситуацію рятує актор, який відчуває, що повноту любові він може проявити лише стовбичачи за дальнім лівим кутком стола.
Або ось ще важливе питання: чи буде природнім для батька проклясти доньку до того, як вона зніме капелюшок, чи вже після?
Життя актора виявилось не лише складним, а й ризиковим, особливо на гастролях, коли часом доводилось тікати з міста без грошей і Джером навчився так спати під парканами, щоб його не помічали поліцейські. На щастя «на дні» він зустрів свого друга дитинства, який також «опустився» - зайнявся журналістикою. Так почав Джером писати, заходячи потроху в літературний світ. Критики його не любили. Вони всіляко намагались його образити, називаючи Гаррі К. Гаррі і чумою англійської літератури, а його гумор тавруючи вульгарним. Газета «Морнінг пост» взагалі заявила, що Джером - це приклад того, до яких сумних наслідків призводить надлишок освіти серед нижчих класів.
Першу книгу, яка дуже добре продавалась, оголосили абсолютним бздурами, а коли Джером опублікував другу, то літературознавці вже нарікали, що автор такої прекрасної першої книжки не зміг зробити другу нормальною.
В ті часи літературна тусовка збиралась в клубі «Дикун» і радихалась, напиваючись до свинячих голосів. Одного разу якийсь джентльмен замовив чаю. Офіціант злякано вирячився на нього і перепитав, а згодом побіг до власника. На щастя, в того була дружина і він позичив в неї чайника, напій заварили, але ще два тижні всі тільки й говорили про цю подію, вбачаючи в ній ознаки скорої загибелі англійської літератури.
Дуже люблю зустрічати в чиїхось спогадах інших відомих людей. Вони наче виходять із сутінків, отримуючи тіло і живе лице.
Ось, наприклад, Герберт Уеллс, чудовий соромʼязливий дядько, який не вмів сперечатись. Він моментально втрачав контроль, починав кричати і махати руками (наче я). При цьому Уеллс вражаючий письменник - він завершує нову книгу скоріше, ніж люди дочитають попередню і може вигадати нову релігію швидше, ніж дитина вивчить віршик. Біля свого ліжка Уеллс притулив столика і просинаючись посеред ночі заварював собі каву та писав один-два розділи. Якщо Уеллс не пояснював вам, як влаштовано Всесвіт, то розказував правила складної гри, яку сам щойно придумав і у вас ось-ось мало відбутись коротке замикання в голові. Відпочивати біля цього енергійного Уеллса, за словами Джерома, це все одно, що намагатись спати посеред урагану.
До речі, Джером якось і собі взяв почитати «Острів доктора Моро» Уеллса на ніч і гірко про це пожалкував, бо не міг ані відірватись від книги, ані дочекатись, коли вже настане світанок. Навіть виходив в темряву з ліхтарем на вулицю, бо здалось, що плаче дитина. (Ох, я сама памʼятаю цей «Острів». В нас була ще книжка із моторошними кольоровими ілюстраціями. Оце начитаєшся і тут батьки відправляють тебе забрати газету «Вечірній Київ» у поштовій скриньці внизу - чотири поверхи жаху, де світить лише одна лампочка і та блимає, пробігаєш за рекордні секунди)
А ось мовчазний Джеймс Баррі, автор «Пітера Пена». Якось на вечері його сусідкою по столу виявилось мила, але полохлива панна. Коли подали рибу, Баррі поцікавився в неї: «Чи бували ви в Єгипті?». Вона так розгубилась, що лише коли подавали нову страву відповіла: «Ні». А коли вони вже доїдали мʼясо, запитала в свою чергу: «А ви?». В серйозному погляді Баррі зʼявилась замріяність: «І я ні», - відповів він, після чого обоє замовкли до кінця вечері (господи, як це смішно)
Баррі був доброю людиною. Одного разу він писав якийсь свій роман на галявині, коли ягня, що загубило маму, почало кричати дурним голосом. Баррі припинив роботу і відвів ягня до матері. Не встиг він сісти за писання, як вже друге ягня відбилось і верещало. Довелось і його відводити. Згодом ягнята вже просто бігли до Баррі, заощаджуючи собі час, а от йому так і не вдалось того дня попрацювати.
А ось Редʼярд Кіплінг, який не може навчитись кататись ні на лижах, ні на ковзанах як слід, бо за ним усюди тиняються фотографи, дадаючи зазняти момент падіння. Джерому Кіплінг здавався кометою, яка намагається відірватись від власного хвоста.
На майбутнє, як завжди, я записала собі відвідати деякі місця в Англії. А ще знайти один чарівний будинок на Гекні, на який Джером лише одного разу натрапив і більше не міг знайти. Будинок, заквітчаний фіолетовими гліциніями, стояв біля Темзи. Під ліхтарем Джером побачив оголошення про здачу кімнати і вигадавши історію пішов її оглянути. Його зустріли дві милі бабусенції і приязний ветеран. Великі вікна кімнати доходили майже до рівня річки. Як казково і романтично описує Джером гарні меблі всередині і людей! Оце уявляю надибати цей будинок в гліциніях і тут до тебе дві бабусі виходять. Хоча ні, це вже не Джером, це вже Стівен Кінг якийсь почався.
Я напевно зупинюсь на цій дивній ноті)
А страшну історію Артура Мейчена, Three imposters, з якої починався пост, я собі вже теж додала у вішліст.
- Ваш приятель Мейчен дійсно геній, - сказав він мені наступного дня, - але з собою в ліжко я його більше не візьму!»
Джером Клапка Джером «Моє життя і часи»
Я узяла з собою в ліжко Джерома К. Джерома коли оце захворіла і не пошкодувала. Мій улюблений письменник - цей сумний сивий пан з непростим життям і тонким почуттям гумору. Скільки разів я прочитала його короткі оповідання і «Троє у човні»! Досі памʼятаю, як в гостинці на Новобіличах читала мамі вголос товстезну книгу, частково згризену нашим папугою. Коли ми дійшли до того моменту, як троє друзів, збираючись в подорож на човні, намагались запхати масло в чайник, а згодом в процесі пакування і взагалі його загубили, в нас почались судоми і по щоках вже просто текли сльози. Це та книжка, яку треба читати вголос.
Тож я лягла «боліть» із гумористом. Я взагалі спогади про те, «як було колись» люблю чи не найбільше з усіх інших жанрів літератури, а ще й від такого оповідача, як Джером, це ж обше! Тому якщо вам цікаво, я дещо перекажу, бо ж українською ці мемуари не переклали.
Часи Джерома - це коли паби зустрічались на кожному кроці, на тверезу людину на вулиці озирались з подивом, а пʼяні діти були цілком звичним явищем. Тоді зими в Лондоні були такі сніжні, що по мосту неможливо було пройти, поки двірники не розчистять стежки, залізниці лише починали підкорювати високі гори, а гольф захоплював зелені галявини, так що коням не було вже де проїхати.
Дитинст��о письменника було дуже бідним. Він мріяв так розбагатіти, щоб не замислюючись купити квиток на омнібус і ней йти пішки. Та нудну контору юний Джером покинув, захопившись театральним життям і яскравою сценою. В нього виходило добре. В «Гамлеті» він зіграв усі ролі окрім Офелії, а в «Мазепі» по Байрону Джером грав аж за трьох - пастуха, солдата і священника. Головну роль, власне романтичного героя Мазепу, грала кремезна акторка Лайза Вебер у такому відвертому костюмі, якого в Лондоні тоді ще не бачили, тож в театрі придумали поставити прямо під сценою особливі стільці за окрему ціну і гроші текли рікою. В якийсь момент цієї вистави Джером з колегою мали відвʼязувати Мазепу від коня і з трудом тягнути в інший кінець сцени, поки акторка пошепки проклинала їх і обіцяла різні кари, якщо вони її впустять. Вона їм так набридла, що одного разу вони вирішили впустити її в оркестрову яму, добряче перед тим розгойдавши.
Ох, які пристрасті і шкандалі чаїть в собі театральне закулісся! Наприклад, дружбу всього життя може перекреслити питання, чи повинен актор, який збирається освідчитись у коханні, зробити три кроки вліво і стати в центрі сцени, беручись за стілець лівою рукою, чи його почуття можуть розкритись лише тоді, коли він стоїть навколішки перед каміном, спираючись лівим ліктем на камінну полицю? Ситуацію рятує актор, який відчуває, що повноту любові він може проявити лише стовбичачи за дальнім лівим кутком стола.
Або ось ще важливе питання: чи буде природнім для батька проклясти доньку до того, як вона зніме капелюшок, чи вже після?
Життя актора виявилось не лише складним, а й ризиковим, особливо на гастролях, коли часом доводилось тікати з міста без грошей і Джером навчився так спати під парканами, щоб його не помічали поліцейські. На щастя «на дні» він зустрів свого друга дитинства, який також «опустився» - зайнявся журналістикою. Так почав Джером писати, заходячи потроху в літературний світ. Критики його не любили. Вони всіляко намагались його образити, називаючи Гаррі К. Гаррі і чумою англійської літератури, а його гумор тавруючи вульгарним. Газета «Морнінг пост» взагалі заявила, що Джером - це приклад того, до яких сумних наслідків призводить надлишок освіти серед нижчих класів.
Першу книгу, яка дуже добре продавалась, оголосили абсолютним бздурами, а коли Джером опублікував другу, то літературознавці вже нарікали, що автор такої прекрасної першої книжки не зміг зробити другу нормальною.
В ті часи літературна тусовка збиралась в клубі «Дикун» і радихалась, напиваючись до свинячих голосів. Одного разу якийсь джентльмен замовив чаю. Офіціант злякано вирячився на нього і перепитав, а згодом побіг до власника. На щастя, в того була дружина і він позичив в неї чайника, напій заварили, але ще два тижні всі тільки й говорили про цю подію, вбачаючи в ній ознаки скорої загибелі англійської літератури.
Дуже люблю зустрічати в чиїхось спогадах інших відомих людей. Вони наче виходять із сутінків, отримуючи тіло і живе лице.
Ось, наприклад, Герберт Уеллс, чудовий соромʼязливий дядько, який не вмів сперечатись. Він моментально втрачав контроль, починав кричати і махати руками (наче я). При цьому Уеллс вражаючий письменник - він завершує нову книгу скоріше, ніж люди дочитають попередню і може вигадати нову релігію швидше, ніж дитина вивчить віршик. Біля свого ліжка Уеллс притулив столика і просинаючись посеред ночі заварював собі каву та писав один-два розділи. Якщо Уеллс не пояснював вам, як влаштовано Всесвіт, то розказував правила складної гри, яку сам щойно придумав і у вас ось-ось мало відбутись коротке замикання в голові. Відпочивати біля цього енергійного Уеллса, за словами Джерома, це все одно, що намагатись спати посеред урагану.
До речі, Джером якось і собі взяв почитати «Острів доктора Моро» Уеллса на ніч і гірко про це пожалкував, бо не міг ані відірватись від книги, ані дочекатись, коли вже настане світанок. Навіть виходив в темряву з ліхтарем на вулицю, бо здалось, що плаче дитина. (Ох, я сама памʼятаю цей «Острів». В нас була ще книжка із моторошними кольоровими ілюстраціями. Оце начитаєшся і тут батьки відправляють тебе забрати газету «Вечірній Київ» у поштовій скриньці внизу - чотири поверхи жаху, де світить лише одна лампочка і та блимає, пробігаєш за рекордні секунди)
А ось мовчазний Джеймс Баррі, автор «Пітера Пена». Якось на вечері його сусідкою по столу виявилось мила, але полохлива панна. Коли подали рибу, Баррі поцікавився в неї: «Чи бували ви в Єгипті?». Вона так розгубилась, що лише коли подавали нову страву відповіла: «Ні». А коли вони вже доїдали мʼясо, запитала в свою чергу: «А ви?». В серйозному погляді Баррі зʼявилась замріяність: «І я ні», - відповів він, після чого обоє замовкли до кінця вечері (господи, як це смішно)
Баррі був доброю людиною. Одного разу він писав якийсь свій роман на галявині, коли ягня, що загубило маму, почало кричати дурним голосом. Баррі припинив роботу і відвів ягня до матері. Не встиг він сісти за писання, як вже друге ягня відбилось і верещало. Довелось і його відводити. Згодом ягнята вже просто бігли до Баррі, заощаджуючи собі час, а от йому так і не вдалось того дня попрацювати.
А ось Редʼярд Кіплінг, який не може навчитись кататись ні на лижах, ні на ковзанах як слід, бо за ним усюди тиняються фотографи, дадаючи зазняти момент падіння. Джерому Кіплінг здавався кометою, яка намагається відірватись від власного хвоста.
На майбутнє, як завжди, я записала собі відвідати деякі місця в Англії. А ще знайти один чарівний будинок на Гекні, на який Джером лише одного разу натрапив і більше не міг знайти. Будинок, заквітчаний фіолетовими гліциніями, стояв біля Темзи. Під ліхтарем Джером побачив оголошення про здачу кімнати і вигадавши історію пішов її оглянути. Його зустріли дві милі бабусенції і приязний ветеран. Великі вікна кімнати доходили майже до рівня річки. Як казково і романтично описує Джером гарні меблі всередині і людей! Оце уявляю надибати цей будинок в гліциніях і тут до тебе дві бабусі виходять. Хоча ні, це вже не Джером, це вже Стівен Кінг якийсь почався.
Я напевно зупинюсь на цій дивній ноті)
А страшну історію Артура Мейчена, Three imposters, з якої починався пост, я собі вже теж додала у вішліст.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 19, 2020
Right from the beginning it's clear why one is fortunate to have chanced upon this book to read, and thank the author for penning it and publishing it. His times were of great personae that lived then and worked, including not only great authors, but also scientists on verge of discoveries and events gathering on the horizon that were soon to descend, that changed the course of humanity.
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
October 19, 2020
Right from the beginning it's clear why one is fortunate to have chanced upon this book to read, and thank the author for penning it and publishing it. His times were of great personae that lived then and worked, including not only great authors, but also scientists on verge of discoveries and events gathering on the horizon that were soon to descend, that changed the course of humanity.
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
December 8, 2017
The book contains lots of valuable historic data:
E.g., that in the late 19th century Germany was seen by the English as an ally while France as an enemy (“One of the Northcliffe papers published a feuilleton, picturing the next war: England—her Navy defeated by French submarines—was saved, just in the nick of time, by the arrival of the German Fleet.”).
Or: “Our heroine shocked the critics. She rode a bicycle. It was unwomanly, then, to ride a bicycle.”
Etc., etc.
But the reading itself is not very interesting. A great writer, like Jerome K. Jerome, could do better.
Still, there are some good jokes.
E.g., that in the late 19th century Germany was seen by the English as an ally while France as an enemy (“One of the Northcliffe papers published a feuilleton, picturing the next war: England—her Navy defeated by French submarines—was saved, just in the nick of time, by the arrival of the German Fleet.”).
Or: “Our heroine shocked the critics. She rode a bicycle. It was unwomanly, then, to ride a bicycle.”
Etc., etc.
But the reading itself is not very interesting. A great writer, like Jerome K. Jerome, could do better.
Still, there are some good jokes.
September 7, 2008
As funny as any of his fiction. I particularly enjoyed the religious discussions at the end, but the book can be enjoyed without them too.
March 19, 2016
Pleasant enough book but not very revealing and full of people who are unknown today.How quickly fame fades.
October 19, 2020
Right from the beginning it's clear why one is fortunate to have chanced upon this book to read, and thank the author for penning it and publishing it. His times were of great personae that lived then and worked, including not only great authors, but also scientists on verge of discoveries and events gathering on the horizon that were soon to descend, that changed the course of humanity.
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
October 19, 2020
Right from the beginning it's clear why one is fortunate to have chanced upon this book to read, and thank the author for penning it and publishing it. His times were of great personae that lived then and worked, including not only great authors, but also scientists on verge of discoveries and events gathering on the horizon that were soon to descend, that changed the course of humanity.
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
............
"Pagani’s was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection of about a dozen. For a time — until J. M. Barrie and Coulson Kernahan came into it — I was the youngest. We dined together once a fortnight in Pagani’s first-floor front at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston’s death, founded the Vagabonds’ club. We grew and prospered, dining Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals — that sort of people — in marble halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor Philip.
"At Pagani’s, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been a heated argument, some taking Swinburne’s part and others siding with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget, about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr. X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind’s baby and the other lady’s baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would have gone well but that Mr. X’s lady had presented him with twins. Blind’s idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs. X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made into a footstool. Mr. X’s suggestion was that he should buy Blind out. Blind’s retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani’s customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.
"Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running a monthly magazine called Home Chimes. Barrie was writing articles for it, and I was doing a monthly “Causerie” titled “Gossips’ Corner” and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him; and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among its contributors.
"In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us. Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into Shaw’s modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn’t he kick the interviewer downstairs? Failing that, why didn’t he call in the police? It seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn’t come down, but would throw his boot at the first man who opened the door."
"Philip, a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip’s old father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he had helped on the Cornhill Magazine, and Lewis and George Eliot. I remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I held — I hold it still — that a really great book could be written by a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it “Confessions of a Fool.”
"I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been interesting to have had her point of view."
"The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed “Barabbas,” told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I asked him if it were true. “Quite true,” he answered; “I am going to speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing extenuating.” He also added that he might, before he left London, be asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn’t a bit the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan."
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
As one begins the book, one realises, if one has already read the author's Paul Kelver ( - which is so if one has been going through a volume of Complete Works of Jerome K Jerome), how much of that book was really autobiographical, and one begins instead to be surprised and even indignant at details missed in Paul Kelver instead, for instance Paul being an only child, and the author not mentioning the two sisters and the younger brother he himself had.
............
"Writing the word “Luther” reminds me of an odd incident. I was called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome. A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr. Wells’ Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and all the dead were living.
It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But there was still “something about the eyes,” she explained. It was certainly curious."
"“July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and dreary drought.”
"To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the country. But I had forgotten it."
"It was one evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase “wanting the moon.” I remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood. Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly."
"It remains in my memory as quite a happy time. Not till years later did I learn how poor we were — of the long and bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany bedsteads, and in my father’s room stood the Great Chest. The topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know — for certain — what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat."
............
"From Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found to be a quarter of an hour’s sharp walking. So I breakfasted at half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. ... At Dalston Junction one changed, and went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent’s Park. ... School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom — in the winter with a blanket wrapped round me — and get to work on my home lessons. Often they would take me until ten or eleven o’clock, and difficulty enough I had to keep myself awake."
Jerome K. Jerome mentions schoolmates, of which Dan is familiar, been described exactly so in Paul Kelver.
"William Willett was one of my schoolmates."
"In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket enabling me to extend my radius."
"There was a fine old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me; but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty — two years before — he had tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died, having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of poetry in him."
"There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse ‘bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea — of all things in the world — on a bench with a long table in front of it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over the front door, announcing “Apartments to let.” I was so interested that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was ....
July 7, 2021
As much as I love Jerome (and I do), I did not enjoy his autobiography. I was let down that he had decided to write more on his times, than his life.
Made worse by those brief glimpses into his existence he did put to paper.
I wasn't at all interested in what other men did during his time, I wanted to know what he did.
I suppose, as a celebrity, he'd have had to share his every little detail with his fans, and probably wanted to hold back on things he didn't want to share anymore, but then why write an autobiography?
He mentions the most vital things in passing:
"I was married by that point".
Oh really? Who is your wife? How did you meet her? How did you propose? How old were you on your wedding day? He mentions her as though we are already well acquainted. He never once says her name (which made quite a difference from his constant and incessant celebrity name dropping 🙄).
Worse is his literary treatment of his daughters. One of which was a stepdaughter from his wife's first marriage to a man Jerome actually stole her from, by the way. No mention of how he felt becoming a stepfather. Or even how he felt when his biological daughter was born. It was simply:
"My girls went to the same gym as Mark Twain's children."
He could have been talking about anyone. He put more effort into explaining his niece was pious, and had 5 siblings, and his nephew was a famous cyclist.
He spoke more about his dogs and horses than he did his wife and children.
I know in his later books, there was a suspicious amount of thought dedicated to the idea that love wears thin throughout marriage. Perhaps he, like many men before him, discovered the elements that make a great mistress make an awful wife. Did he steal and marry in haste, to repent at leisure? And this book confirms it?
I wanted so much more than he was willing to give, which once again raises the question of why he bothered to write this book in the first place.
The constant name dropping honestly did my head in. Save for a handful, the reputation of these celebrities did not outlive them, and reading that he met so-and-so at so-and-so's ball at the great so-and-so's house made me understand why his wife sometimes chose not to accompany him.
The beginning of the book was beautiful, and I wish he'd kept up that pace. We got a look into his childhood, as well as his thoughts about his experiences. He made me smile, and laugh out loud, and cry with him, hurt with him, yearn for simplistic childhood dreams with him.
Then he got published and it all changed. Perhaps, just perhaps (and it kills me to say this)...
Money ruined him.
There were a few things in this book that really hammered history home for me. As a student of the art, I can rattle off dates and names at the drop of a hat, but rarely do I sit and think about the humans I'm talking about. Jerome (like he always does, like I love him for always doing) made sure to leave me thinking. When describing his sweet German nanny who always believed God would take care of her, he simply stated she had died of starvation during the war. That sentence was a kick in the gut. He'd made me love this woman who had once lived, laughed, loved, only to tell me of the horrific end that befell her.
These were real people he wrote about. Perhaps that was why this book is like it is. Sometimes there are no happy endings.
The last chapter was a surprise. I found in it a Jerome I hadn't known was there. He admitted to spending weeks on his knees in prayer for his father to be spared death, only to watch him die young. And so, he hadn't bothered praying for his mother when her turn came. He saw no point in it. Once bitten, twice as shy, I suppose.
But this has stayed with me. I've been so low that I no longer believed I was being taken care of. I understood his sentiment. It touched me in a way his amusing annedotes about skating with the German crown princess never could. Humans don't change at their core, we are who we were a century ago. He just reiterated that.
I still can't tell who Jerome was at his core. I thought reading this book would show me. But he didn't want that.
I'd still like to think I would have been fond of him had I known him.
Especially for his defiance
(like writing an autobiography without actually telling us anything about himself)!
Made worse by those brief glimpses into his existence he did put to paper.
I wasn't at all interested in what other men did during his time, I wanted to know what he did.
I suppose, as a celebrity, he'd have had to share his every little detail with his fans, and probably wanted to hold back on things he didn't want to share anymore, but then why write an autobiography?
He mentions the most vital things in passing:
"I was married by that point".
Oh really? Who is your wife? How did you meet her? How did you propose? How old were you on your wedding day? He mentions her as though we are already well acquainted. He never once says her name (which made quite a difference from his constant and incessant celebrity name dropping 🙄).
Worse is his literary treatment of his daughters. One of which was a stepdaughter from his wife's first marriage to a man Jerome actually stole her from, by the way. No mention of how he felt becoming a stepfather. Or even how he felt when his biological daughter was born. It was simply:
"My girls went to the same gym as Mark Twain's children."
He could have been talking about anyone. He put more effort into explaining his niece was pious, and had 5 siblings, and his nephew was a famous cyclist.
He spoke more about his dogs and horses than he did his wife and children.
I know in his later books, there was a suspicious amount of thought dedicated to the idea that love wears thin throughout marriage. Perhaps he, like many men before him, discovered the elements that make a great mistress make an awful wife. Did he steal and marry in haste, to repent at leisure? And this book confirms it?
I wanted so much more than he was willing to give, which once again raises the question of why he bothered to write this book in the first place.
The constant name dropping honestly did my head in. Save for a handful, the reputation of these celebrities did not outlive them, and reading that he met so-and-so at so-and-so's ball at the great so-and-so's house made me understand why his wife sometimes chose not to accompany him.
The beginning of the book was beautiful, and I wish he'd kept up that pace. We got a look into his childhood, as well as his thoughts about his experiences. He made me smile, and laugh out loud, and cry with him, hurt with him, yearn for simplistic childhood dreams with him.
Then he got published and it all changed. Perhaps, just perhaps (and it kills me to say this)...
Money ruined him.
There were a few things in this book that really hammered history home for me. As a student of the art, I can rattle off dates and names at the drop of a hat, but rarely do I sit and think about the humans I'm talking about. Jerome (like he always does, like I love him for always doing) made sure to leave me thinking. When describing his sweet German nanny who always believed God would take care of her, he simply stated she had died of starvation during the war. That sentence was a kick in the gut. He'd made me love this woman who had once lived, laughed, loved, only to tell me of the horrific end that befell her.
These were real people he wrote about. Perhaps that was why this book is like it is. Sometimes there are no happy endings.
The last chapter was a surprise. I found in it a Jerome I hadn't known was there. He admitted to spending weeks on his knees in prayer for his father to be spared death, only to watch him die young. And so, he hadn't bothered praying for his mother when her turn came. He saw no point in it. Once bitten, twice as shy, I suppose.
But this has stayed with me. I've been so low that I no longer believed I was being taken care of. I understood his sentiment. It touched me in a way his amusing annedotes about skating with the German crown princess never could. Humans don't change at their core, we are who we were a century ago. He just reiterated that.
I still can't tell who Jerome was at his core. I thought reading this book would show me. But he didn't want that.
I'd still like to think I would have been fond of him had I known him.
Especially for his defiance
(like writing an autobiography without actually telling us anything about himself)!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 29, 2025
This autobiography is a bit long-winded, and is actually a collection of anecdotes, told at random and then divided into chapters by topic, about famous writers like George Bernard Shaw, Eden Phillpotts, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and others less famous, as well as about famous actors and actresses of the time (in fact, J.K.J. also wrote many comedies).
The story of the evolution of the bicycle, which took place before his eyes, from the dangerous high-wheel to the safer so-called safety bike, is interesting.
One chapter is dedicated to the war—the war, not the First World War, since the book was written in 1926 (a year before he died).
But even before this chapter, the war had been present in the story. At one point, he recounts how a "Fraulein" who had been his daughters' governess during a period when they lived in Germany died of starvation during the Blockade ("the Blockade was conducted by the Allies during and after World War I. By December 1918, nearly 800,000 civilians had died of starvation due to the blockade". [Wikipedia]); I did not know about this. He also mentioned the deaths of two young men who were friends: Arthur Conan Doyle's nephew, his sister's son, aged 20, and Kipling's son, aged 18, very sad.
It was an interesting read, even if there are no accounts or details of his private life, how he met his wife or more about his daughters.
The story of the evolution of the bicycle, which took place before his eyes, from the dangerous high-wheel to the safer so-called safety bike, is interesting.
One chapter is dedicated to the war—the war, not the First World War, since the book was written in 1926 (a year before he died).
But even before this chapter, the war had been present in the story. At one point, he recounts how a "Fraulein" who had been his daughters' governess during a period when they lived in Germany died of starvation during the Blockade ("the Blockade was conducted by the Allies during and after World War I. By December 1918, nearly 800,000 civilians had died of starvation due to the blockade". [Wikipedia]); I did not know about this. He also mentioned the deaths of two young men who were friends: Arthur Conan Doyle's nephew, his sister's son, aged 20, and Kipling's son, aged 18, very sad.
It was an interesting read, even if there are no accounts or details of his private life, how he met his wife or more about his daughters.
May 9, 2021
A splendid wander through the life of a fascinating man endowed with a unique and delicious sense of humour. Among various things, we learn of his impoverished and parentless upbringing, later dinner parties featuring a highly eccentric JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, the London theatre of the Victorian period, and the confusion of the First World War. Jerome K. Jerome must go down as one of England’s most delightful characters and authors. An absolute joy of an autobiography - highly recommended.
March 25, 2025
Enjoyable read of anecdotes of Jerome's life. It was fascinating to read casual namedrops of celebrity intellectuals of his time. And funny incidents, especially the language troubles of Doyle.
A book I wished that would never end.
A book I wished that would never end.
June 11, 2018
Finally read something after months of translating something
November 10, 2014
A bit disjointed
After his moving account of his poverty-stricken childhood in a loving family, we do not learn a great deal more about Jerome’s private life. His wife is introduced by the laconic statement: „ I was married by then“, and we first learn that he had children when he mentions them going to the same school as Mark Twain’s.
He talks of the variety of jobs he held, the sports he enjoyed, the houses he lived in, the pets he had, the excursions he took and of the pleasant life he led after the financial success of „Three Men in a Boat“, living and travelling extensively on the continent and rubbing shoulders with the rich and/or famous of the day.
He paints a mostly idyllic picture of Britain and reminisces extensively on the theater scene: Dozens of names come up – many of them probably unfamiliar to modern readers : playwrights, actors, producers, editors, critics, theatre managers, magazine publishers, etc. etc. and he tells some amusing anecdotes of Shaw, Conan Doyle, Wells, Kipling, etc.
He describes his impressions of America and the Americans collected during several lecture tours there and raises the subject of racial hatred.
The strongest chapters come at the end of the book: his experiences as an ambulance driver in France during the first world war and his religious convictions.
To me this memoir appears uneven, jumping from topic to topic with little in the way of transition between the deadly serious and the very lighthearted and I would have liked to know more about Jerome the husband and family man.
After his moving account of his poverty-stricken childhood in a loving family, we do not learn a great deal more about Jerome’s private life. His wife is introduced by the laconic statement: „ I was married by then“, and we first learn that he had children when he mentions them going to the same school as Mark Twain’s.
He talks of the variety of jobs he held, the sports he enjoyed, the houses he lived in, the pets he had, the excursions he took and of the pleasant life he led after the financial success of „Three Men in a Boat“, living and travelling extensively on the continent and rubbing shoulders with the rich and/or famous of the day.
He paints a mostly idyllic picture of Britain and reminisces extensively on the theater scene: Dozens of names come up – many of them probably unfamiliar to modern readers : playwrights, actors, producers, editors, critics, theatre managers, magazine publishers, etc. etc. and he tells some amusing anecdotes of Shaw, Conan Doyle, Wells, Kipling, etc.
He describes his impressions of America and the Americans collected during several lecture tours there and raises the subject of racial hatred.
The strongest chapters come at the end of the book: his experiences as an ambulance driver in France during the first world war and his religious convictions.
To me this memoir appears uneven, jumping from topic to topic with little in the way of transition between the deadly serious and the very lighthearted and I would have liked to know more about Jerome the husband and family man.
September 15, 2015
Of course the book is peppered with characteristic humorous observations but it has sober reflections on his childhood poverty and corruscating attacks on racism in the United States. And like Dickens before him he cannot go to the States without bemoaning the huge loss of income he suffered from his books being copied and printed for which,without the benefit of copyright, he did not receive a cent.
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