Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow is a collection of comic essays by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1886. It was his first commercial success and the book that made his reputation a few years before Three Men in a Boat arrived to make him famous. The essays first appeared in a magazine called Home Chimes, and the collected volume kept Jerome in print steadily for years.

The conceit of the book is simple. Each essay takes a small subject of ordinary life, like being in love, eating and drinking, being shy, vanity and other small subjects, and lets Jerome talk around it for a few thousand words. The essays are not really arguments. They are loose comic meditations that wander from anecdote to anecdote and that pretend to a kind of leisurely worldly wisdom. The speaker is the idle fellow of the title, a young man with too much time and too many opinions, sitting by a fire smoking a pipe and amusing himself with his own thoughts.

What makes the book still readable is the voice. Jerome had not yet developed the more sophisticated comic timing of Three Men in a Boat, but the basic gift is here. He can extend a small observation into a long ramble that keeps finding new angles, and he can puncture a sentimental notion with a single sharp sentence at exactly the right moment. The essay on being in love is the most famous piece in the book and is still genuinely funny, even after a century and a half of changes in how people fall in love.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is best read in essay sized pieces rather than straight through. There is a second volume, Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, that appeared in 1898 and that is in the same manner. For readers who have liked Jerome’s other work, Idle Thoughts pairs naturally with Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green and with the early chapters of Three Men in a Boat, where the same fireside voice keeps interrupting the boating to discourse on whatever happens to occur to him.