Jerome K. Jerome: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him

JEROME K. JEROME: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS ABOUT HIM By Carl Markgraf (Portland State University) Author of more than forty novels, plays, short story collections, and works of humor, as well as editor of two successful London journals, "JKJ," as he was known in his own time, is remembered principally for one work: Three Men in a Boat. Published in 1889, still in print, adapted as a film in 1956 and for television in 1979, the comic tale of the threesome's trip up the Thames was even the source for a 1972 re-creation of the journey in order to provide a photo-essay for the Sunday Times Magazine. All this suggests how widely and deeply the book has captured and held the imaginations of British and, to a lesser extent, American readers for almost a hundred years. Other more serious works—such as the novel Paul Kelver and, more notably, the play The Passing of the Third Floor Back—successfully demonstrated that JKJ had a wider range than the comic fiction and plays which had made his name. Still, it was as the originator of "the new humour" that he continued to be known. Paul Kelver had appeared in 1902 to critical acclamation, but the general public still expected comedy from Jerome, and the Harrogate opening night of The Passing of the Third Floor Back in August of 1908 was puzzling to an audience that came to laugh but was presented with what has often been called a modern morality play. Further, the play's break from the structural three-act tradition, a break which helped lead the way toward the use of non-traditional forms in modernist English drama, was also a surprise for its first audience. After JKJ's successful formula comedies, such as The Prude's Progress (1895) and The MacHaggis (1897), the playgoer could hardly have expected what he got: a Christ-figure who reforms the unsvory occupants of a sleazy Bloomsbury boarding house. A long-run success in London and on its American tour, the play remained popular for over forty years, as indicated by reviews of professional performances as late as 1949. In a seeminly odd pairing with Three Men in a Boat, it remains in critical reference books as JKJ's "other" memorable work. However, despite ventures into "serious" writing like The Passing of the Third Floor Back, Paul Kelver, and later novels (e.g., All Roads Lead to Calvary [1919], and Anthony John [1923]), the bulk of JKJ's writing consists of what might be called entertainments. From his first published work to his last—from On the Stage—'and Off (1885), a collection of loosely connected humorous sketches of theatre life, to his last play, The Soul of Nicholas Snyders (1927; 1925 in U.S. as Man or Devil)—Jerome was constantly involved with the stage. More than half his works were at least concerned with it, if we add to the nineteen plays for which we have record of production his On the Stage—and Off, Stage-Land (1889), Playwriting: A Handbook for Would-be Dramatic Authors (1888), and The Diary of a Pilgrimage 1891), which recounts a journey to the Oberammergau Passion Play. Of those works, virtually all were humorous in intent. Most succeeded in amusing the public, but there were many critical failures. The worst, perhaps, was the book for a musical called Biarritz (1896), of which Shaw wrote: "Two minutes of 83 Biarritz would reconcile a Trappist to his monastery for life." Nonetheless, the play had an adequate London run. Indeed, for over forty years, from his first performed work, the one-act play Barbara, which appeared off and on in London and New York from 1886 to 1893, to his last, The Soul of Nicholas Snyders, which first appeared in New York with Lionel Barrymore in the title role, JKJ continually pleased audiences while annoying critics. Although he poked fun at the playwriting formulas he had inherited, he also could not accept the wave of the future, poking fun—admittedly with little effect—at Ibsen as well. The general tone of adverse criticism could be suggested by stating that JKJ allowed himself to...