Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow is a collection of comic essays by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1898. The book is the direct sequel to his enormously successful Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow of 1886, which had been one of his earliest commercial successes and had established the comic essay form that he continued to use across his career.

The original Idle Thoughts had been a collection of magazine essays from Home Chimes magazine. Each essay took a small subject from ordinary life and let Jerome ramble around it for a few thousand words, with the comic timing that became his signature. The book had been so successful that the publisher had been wanting a sequel for years before Jerome eventually produced one. Second Thoughts works in the same mode as the original.

The essays cover the conversational range that the format allowed. There are pieces on the difficulty of being a successful writer, on the various absurdities of country house weekends, on the relations between Englishmen and dogs, on the difficulty of finding good servants, on the comic conventions of the late Victorian theatrical scene, and on various other subjects that Jerome wanted to talk through with his audience. The voice is the slightly older Idle Fellow of the sequel, twelve years on from the original collection and with somewhat more settled views on the various subjects he had touched on earlier.

The essay collection sold reasonably without quite matching the original. Idle Thoughts had been the right book at the right moment, capturing a particular mid-1880s audience and establishing Jerome’s career in a way that the 1898 sequel could not quite repeat. The sequel was nonetheless a solid commercial success and contributed to the steady income that Jerome’s essay collections provided across his career alongside the more dramatic successes of Three Men in a Boat and the various longer novels.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is best read piece by piece rather than straight through. For readers who enjoyed Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, this is the obvious next stop. It pairs with the various Jerome essay collections including The Angel and the Author and Tea Table Talk.