In his move to London, where he became an ironmonger and solicitor, he was equally unlucky. The boy grew up in East London with the family's striving to maintain their genteel heritage and their Puritan faith. Through scholarships Jerome acquired a good early education, but the death of both his father and his mother when he was in his mid-teens left him desolate and poor. After various clerking jobs, he took to the stage for three years, touring the provinces. It gained him little money but much experience, which he used in his humorous but accurate portrayal of the East End theater and the traveling companies. Publication of
On the Stage-and Off (1885),
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), and
Stage-land (1889) gave him courage. At the insistence of Georgina Henrietta Stanley, whom he married on 21 June 1888, he decided to live by his writing.
Three Men in a Boat , begun in the year of his marriage, became an enormous success, subsequently going into many printings. Selling more than a million copies in Jerome's lifetime, it was translated into twenty-seven languages and became a student's English-language reader.
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