Jerome K. Jerome was a familiar name at the turn of the nineteenth century and in the first quarter of the twentieth. He was a humorist, who, under the pose of "the Idler," made his reputation as an essayist, the editor of two magazines (the Idler, 1892-1897, and To-day , 1893-1897), and the author of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889). His plays were successes, none more so than The Passing of the Third Floor Back (first produced in 1908), performed the world over. Contemporary reviewers compared his novels favorably to Dickens's. Their subjects vary; their tone runs from comical to polemical. They are all, in a sense, autobiographical.

Jerome was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2 May 1859, of Devonshire and Welsh parents, Jerome Clapp Jerome and Margaret Jones Jerome, both Nonconformists. His father, who was a trained architect with a strong inclination to the ministry...