Paul Kelver

Paul Kelver is a novel by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1902. It is his most ambitious serious novel and the one he himself thought was his best book, although readers have generally preferred the comic work. The book is openly autobiographical. The hero Paul Kelver is essentially Jerome thinly disguised, growing up in poor circumstances in the East End of London in the 1860s and 1870s, struggling to become a writer.

The novel follows Paul from his early childhood, when his family is reduced from middling comfort to poverty by a business failure, through his school years, his first jobs as a clerk and then as an actor in provincial theaters, and finally his slow emergence as a published writer. The London scenes are the strongest part. Jerome had grown up watching his own father’s collapse from prosperity into a small Stepney coal business and the early chapters of Paul Kelver have the unmistakable detail of remembered childhood, with all the small humiliations and small consolations of a poor family trying to keep up appearances.

The theater chapters are also good. Jerome had himself worked as an actor in his teens and twenties, traveling with cheap touring companies through the English provinces, and Paul Kelver gives a vivid picture of that vanished world of fit ups, boarding houses, and bad food in railway hotels. The book is not as funny as Three Men in a Boat. It is a quieter, slower book that is trying to do something a Dickens influenced bildungsroman might do, with mixed success.

The novel runs about five hundred pages and asks more patience than most Jerome readers expect from him. For readers who liked the more reflective pieces in Malvina of Brittany or the autobiographical chapters of My Life and Times, Paul Kelver is essential. It is the place to see Jerome trying to be a serious novelist, with the result that he became one for the length of a single book, even if he could not sustain the manner. It pairs naturally with the autobiography My Life and Times, which covers some of the same ground in nonfiction.