ABSTRACT

A look at the career of Jerome K. Jerome reveals not only the emergence of a successful English writer of humor but also the response to literary humor among different classes in England at the end of the nineteenth century. Jerome's slangy idiom seems to be especially the "low" kind of humor that enraged late nineteenth-century Punch. In the late 1860s, the American humorist Artemus Ward, renowned for his countrified misspellings, had been invited to contribute to Punch. But initially, and well before Oxford awarded Twain an honorary degree and Punch magazine feted Twain, American humor was a controversial commodity in late Victorian England. Stage-land indicates that Twain continued to be a model for Jerome. When Twain's narrator of The Innocents Abroad is approaching Gibraltar, for example, there is a similar playful tone in the prose: "The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world.