The Angel and the Author--and Others

The Angel and the Author, and Others is a collection of comic essays by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1908. By this point in his career Jerome was a literary fixture in England, with a string of successful books behind him and a serious play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, having recently established him as a writer of substance as well as humor. The Angel and the Author returns to the comic essay form he had first mastered in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, with the deeper voice of a writer in his late forties.

The essays cover a wide range of subjects, in the loose manner Jerome had always favoured. There are pieces on the difficulty of being a successful author, on the strange customs of golf, on the railway carriage as a social institution, on the question of whether women understand cricket, on the relations between cats and humans, on the absurdity of new year resolutions. The title essay imagines an angel sent down to read the work of a successful novelist and to deliver judgment, which goes about as one would expect.

The writing is less sharply pointed than the early work and more discursive. Jerome had developed by this period a willingness to let an essay wander for several pages before settling on its actual subject, and the essays are best read at the pace of someone sitting in a comfortable chair with no urgent need to reach a conclusion. There is also a deeper melancholy in some of the pieces. Jerome was now writing as an older man who had seen friends die and who could not entirely keep the awareness of mortality out of even the comic essays.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read a piece or two at a time. For Jerome readers who liked Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow but want the later voice, this is one of the best later collections. It pairs naturally with Tea Table Talk from 1903 and with the essays in The Observations of Henry, both of which use the same fireside meandering manner. It also shows the writer who would soon produce his serious wartime journalism for the Daily Telegraph and his late autobiography My Life and Times.