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Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

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First published: 1898
Pages: 169

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6 h 53 min · 12 parts

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01 - On The Art Of Making Up One's Mind
33:28
02 - On The Disadvantage Of Not Getting What One Wants
29:06
03 - On The Exceptional Merit Attaching To The Things We Meant To Do
47:00
04 - On The Preparation And Employment Of Love Philtres
35:08
05 - On The Delights And Benefits Of Slavery
35:47
06 - On The Care And Management Of Women
28:38
07 - On The Minding Of Other People's Business
43:49
08 - On The Time Wasted In Looking Before One Leaps
35:39
09 - On The Nobility Of Ourselves
28:44
10 - On The Motherliness Of Man
30:46
11 - On The Inadvisability Of Following Advice
32:30
12 - On The Playing Of Marches At The Funerals Of Marionettes
32:41

Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1899) is a public domain work.

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About this book

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.

About the author

Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels.