Our newest offering is
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by British author Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927).
Published in 1886, this collection of reflections on daily life in late Victorian England helped establish Jerome's reputation as a humorist, and contains many observations that are as accurate today as when they were written more than 130 years ago.
For example, in the very first essay, "On Being Idle," Jerome makes an important distinction between being idle and being merely lazy:
There are plenty of lazy people and plenty of slow-coaches, but a genuine idler is a rarity. He is not a man who slouches about with his hands in his pockets. On the contrary, his most startling characteristic is that he is always intensely busy.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.
Other topics addressed in
Idle Thoughts include food, drink, fashion, money, apartment hunting, weather, shyness, depression, pets, babies, and love. There are many reflections that are witty and poignant as well as humorous:
"Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once. One never need be afraid of catching it a second time."
"Each of us have an inborn conviction that the whole world, with everybody and everything in it, was created as a sort of necessary appendage to ourselves. Our fellow men and women were made to admire us and to minister to our various requirements.... I fear we are most of us like Mrs. Poyser's bantam cock, who fancied the sun got up every morning to hear him crow."
"If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don't, you won't get any.... If you can feel satisfied with a hundred, begin by insisting on a thousand; if you start by suggesting a hundred you will only get ten."
"I think it is only to us in cities that all weather is so unwelcome. In her own home, the country, Nature is sweet in all her moods... Weather in towns is like a skylark in a counting-house—out of place and in the way."
The author, born Jerome Clapp Jerome in Caldmore, England, changed his middle name to Klapka, apparently in honor of a Hungarian military hero (Gyorgy Klapka). After dropping out of school at age 15 due to his family's financial straits, he worked for a railroad, joined a traveling acting troupe, and worked as a clerk and a teacher. His first reasonably successful book was
On the Stage—and Off (1885), a memoir of his years as an actor.
Idle Thoughts was published the following year.
His best known work is
Three Men in a Boat (1889), a comical tale of a trip down the Thames River. Other works by Jerome include its sequel
Three Men on the Bummel (1898), the autobiographical novel
Paul Kelver (1902), and
Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891). He also composed numerous essays, articles, and stage plays and published his autobiography,
My Life and Times (1926), a year before his death at age 68.
Idle Thoughts is now available at our website.
