Jerome K Jerome

Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow Jerome K Jerome

Published in 1886 and dedicated to the writer's ally in idling-his pipe-this collection of entertaining essays established Jerome K. Jerome as an eminent English wit. "What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading 'the best hundred books, ' you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change." Here are his idle and amusing thoughts on all aspects of life-from love to poverty, vanity to ambition, babies to cats and dogs-and, of course, on the pleasures of spending one's time idling. Now, this is a subject on which I flatter myself I really am au fait . The gentleman who, when I was young, bathed me at wisdom's font for nine guineas a term-no extras-used to say he never knew a boy who could do less work in more time; and I remember my poor grandmother once incidentally observing, in the course of an instruction upon the use of the Prayer-book, that it was highly improbable that I should ever do much that I ought not to do, but that she felt convinced beyond a doubt that I should leave undone pretty well everything that I ought to do