Sketches in Lavender Blue and Green

Sketches in Lavender, Blue, and Green is a collection of short pieces by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1895. It came out between his early comic successes and his ambitious autobiographical novel Paul Kelver, and it shows him moving between several different modes that he was equally comfortable in.

The book is divided according to color. The lavender sketches are mostly nostalgic or sentimental pieces, often about love and memory and the gentle disappointments of middle age. The blue sketches are comic in the older Jerome manner, with anecdotes about boarding houses and seaside hotels and small absurdities of London life. The green sketches are mixed in tone, often about characters Jerome had known in his theatrical years or in his early days as a clerk, and they tend to be the most reflective pieces in the book.

The quality is uneven but the best pieces are very good. Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad is one of his sharpest character studies, a short biography of a successful businessman who is selfish in a way the reader recognises immediately. The Inn of the Two Witches is a small comic ghost story. Several of the romantic sketches anticipate the mood of the later Malvina of Brittany stories, with a slight melancholy that the early Jerome did not usually allow himself.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is meant to be dipped into rather than read straight through. Jerome was a magazine essayist before he was anything else, and the natural reading rhythm for his shorter work is one or two pieces at a time over an evening. For readers who already love Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and the comic sections of Three Men in a Boat, this book extends the range and shows the more serious side of his middle period. It pairs naturally with Tea Table Talk and The Observations of Henry, both also from the 1890s, where Jerome was working in the same loose comic essay form.