JEROME K JEROME

BIO SKETCH
 FAMILY

• Spouse/Ex- : Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris

• Father : Jerome Clapp Jerome

• Mother : Marguerite Jones

• Siblings : Blandina Dominica, Milton Melancthon,

Paulina Deodata

• Children : Elsie, Rowena

 CHILDHOOD & EARLY YEARS

• Jerome Klapka Jerome was born on 2 May 1859 in Caldmore, now a part of the industrial town of Walsall in Staffordshire. At birth, he was registered as Jerome Clapp Jerome; but later Clapp was changed into

Klapka after the exiled Hungarian general and family friend, György Klapka.

• His father, Jerome Clapp, was a nonconformist preacher, and owned a coalmine on Cannock Chase. Before that, he had tried farming and stone quarrying in Devonshire.

• Jerome’s mother, Marguerite Jones, was the daughter of a prosperous Swansea solicitor. She had brought in considerable dowry, which his father had invested in the coal mine. Coming from heroic Welsh

nonconformist stock, she never lost her faith in spite of repeated failures in family fortune.

• Jerome Jr. was born at Belsize House, located on the corner of Bradford Street and Caldmore Road. He was his parents’ fourth child, having two elder sisters named Paulina Deodata and Blandina Dominica, and

one elder brother named, Milton Melanchthon, who died at the age of six.

• Initially, they were quite well off. But on the night of Jerome’s first birthday, his father gently woke up his mother to say that his coalmine had been flooded and that he was now a ruined man with just a few

hundred pounds left.

• In 1861, he shifted his family to a smaller house in Stourbridge and moved alone to London. There he set up a wholesale iron mongering business, which did not do as well as he expected. Consequently, he did not

call for his family, living on 5 shillings a week.

• When Jerome was four years old, his mother came to know about his father’s condition and moved her family to London. There, they set up their home in a small house on Sussex Street in Poplar, East London.

• In Poplar, Jerome grew up surrounded by the poorer section of the society, who detested him for his gentlemanly upbringing and tried to bully him. Indeed, the environment there was anything but congenial and in

his biography, Jerome held it responsible for his brooding and melancholy disposition.

• Possibly in January 1869, just before his tenth birthday, young Jerome gained admission at the Philological School, which later became known as Marylebone Grammar School. Although he dreamed big, aspiring

to be a man of letters or a renowned politician, his father’s death in 1872 put an end to it.
 ABOUT HIM AND HIS WORKS

• Jerome K. Jerome, in full Jerome Klapka Jerome, (born May 2, 1859, Walsall, Staffordshire, Eng.—died June
14, 1927, Northampton, Northamptonshire), English novelist and playwright whose humour—warm, unsatirical,
and unintellectual—won him wide following.
• Jerome left school at the age of 14, working first as a railway clerk, then as a schoolteacher, an actor, and a
journalist. His first book, On the Stage—and Off, was published in 1885, but it was with the publication of his next
books, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Three Men in a Boat (1889), that he achieved great success;
both books were widely translated. From 1892 to 1897 he was a coeditor (with Robert Barr and George Brown
Burgin) of The Idler, a monthly magazine that he had helped found, which featured contributions by writers such
as Eden Phillpotts, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte.
• Jerome’s many other works include Three Men on the Bummel (1900) and Paul Kelver (1902), an
autobiographical novel. He also wrote a number of plays. A book of Jerome’s memoirs, My Life and Times, was
published in 1926.
D
68 YEARS (1859–1927)
E
M
I Jerome suffered a paralytic stroke and a
S cerebral haemorrhage in June 1927, on a
motoring tour from Devon to London via
E Cheltenham and Northampton. He lay in
Northampton General Hospital for two
weeks before dying on 14 June.
MADE BY :: PARTH KOOLWAL
CLASS :: VI – C

TO :: JYOTI PUSHKARNA MAM

THANK YOU !!