We regret to record the death of Mr. Jerome K.
Jerome, the well-known novelist and playwright. His books, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Three Men in a Boat, and On the Stage and Off, brought him an enormous public. Their boisterousness and rather Cock- neyish humour fix the books to the period in which they were written. The knockabout fun was very simple, but irresistible. Mr. Jerome would often turn in a disconcerting way from a sort of literary practical- joking to undisciplined sentimentalizing. He was, indeed, a serious and very genuine man who was capable of deep melancholy at the spectacle of a world gone wrong. He had a love of beauty and an artistry which could be expressed through a favourable medium, and these qualities plainly appeared in some of his best though less well known works such as Paul Kelver. In his later years he was impatient of the early books which had brought him his fame. His best-known play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, was really a moral lecture. It was ill-constructed at every point of stage- craft, but its intense sincerity (with the help of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson) carried it through.
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