Sketches from Jerome's middle register: a man who reforms, a woman who does not, a clerk, an actress, a dog. He was orphaned at fifteen and worked as a railway clerk, a schoolmaster and a jobbing actor before Three Men in a Boat — which he wrote as a serious travel guide and could not keep the jokes out of. Half these pieces are comic and half are not, and he does not signal which. Sixty plates by painters including John Atkinson Grimshaw and Walter Sickert, their docks, bridges and music halls catching the same late-Victorian moods these sketches move between.
