杰罗姆·克拉普卡·杰罗姆

杰罗姆·克拉普卡·杰罗姆（Jerome K. Jerome，1859年5月2日—1927年6月14日）是英国幽默作家，他最著名的作品是幽默游记《三人同舟》。

杰罗姆出生在英国沃尔索尔的卡德摩尔村（Caldmore），在伦敦长大。他的生平在沃尔索尔博物馆展出。

他的其他知名作品包括文集《懒人懒办法》与《懒人又有懒办法了》；以及《三人出游记》（《三人同舟》的续集）。

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) 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, in the English Midlands. Although his family struggled with poverty at times, he was able to attend a grammar school, but derived little benefit from it. After his father died in 1871 Jerome tried to earn a living in various occupations including a clerical post and three years as an actor. In his twenties he began writing and was able to publish some work, with increasing success. He married in 1888 and he published his most popular work, Three Men in a Boat, the following year. He continued to write fiction and non-fiction over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success. He also wrote plays, of which The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908) was the most successful. Most have remained unpublished.

His works were generally more popular with the general public than with reviewers, many of whom looked down on Jerome, declaring his writing colloquial and vulgar – the very characteristics that appealed to the book-buying and theatre-going public. Punch dubbed him "'Arry J. 'Arry". It was not until the publication of his semi-autobiographical novel Paul Kelver in 1902 that heavyweight critics began praising him.

Life and career

Early years

Jerome was born in Walsall, England on 2 May 1859. He was the fourth and last child of Jerome Clapp (who later took the name Jerome Clapp Jerome) and his wife Marguerite, née Jones. Jerome junior was registered at birth as Jerome Clapp Jerome. He had two sisters, Paulina and Blandina, and one brother, Milton; the last died at an early age. The exiled Hungarian general György Klapka was staying with Jerome's family at the time of the boy's birth, and Jerome later adopted that surname as a second given name.

Jerome's father was a nonconformist lay preacher and Staffordshire coalmine owner; the boy's mother was the daughter of a Swansea lawyer. The biographer Damian Atkinson writes that Jerome senior was of puritan background and had trained as an architect and that his wife, also from a nonconformist family, had some financial assets. After the failure of the colliery the family moved to Stourbridge, Worcestershire, and later to east London, where Jerome senior became an ironmonger, not greatly successfully.

At the age of nine Jerome passed the entry test for the Philological School of General Instruction in Lisson Grove, Marylebone, which later became St Marylebone Grammar School. There he had his only formal education. He was not impressed by the school. He saw its methods as foolish and useless, cramming pupils full of unusable fact. The only good thing he had to say of the establishment was that it did not employ corporal punishment.

In 1871, when Jerome was thirteen, his father died of a heart attack and the boy became the family's sole wage-earner, leaving school to become a clerk for the London and North Western Railway. The pay was not generous and Jerome worked a great deal of overtime to support the family. His biographer Joseph Connolly writes, "He had not enjoyed school, and neither did he enjoy being a clerk. Sitting at a desk doing what he was told was not his idea of how life should be spent".

Theatre

Jerome was inspired by his sister Blandina's love for the theatre, and he decided to try his hand at acting in 1877.