They And I

They and I is a comic novel by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1909. It is one of his most relaxed late comic books and one of the most directly autobiographical of his fictions, drawing on his own experience as a father of grown children at the time he was writing it.

The novel is narrated by a middle aged writer who is moving with his family from a London flat to an old country house in the south of England. The family consists of his wife and three children, two daughters and a son, all in their late teens and early twenties. The book is essentially a series of scenes from the resettling of the household, the renovation of the old house, the negotiations with local tradesmen, the small adjustments to country life, and the running argument between the narrator and his children about how everything should be done.

The comedy comes from the gap between the narrator’s view of himself as the steady centre of the family and the children’s view of him as a useful but slightly slow assistant to their own much more sophisticated projects. The three children are sharply drawn. Veronica is the eldest daughter and the most direct. Robina is the second daughter and the most diplomatic. Dick is the son and is the one who keeps inventing complications. Jerome lets the children talk in the slightly slangy way of their generation and gives the narrator the bemused middle aged voice of a man who used to think he was modern.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is one of his easiest late reads. It is shorter and more compact than Paul Kelver and is firmly in the comic vein, although there are quiet passages about the passage of time and the slow turning of children into adults that give the book a little more weight than its surface suggests. For readers who enjoyed Three Men in a Boat and want a later, gentler Jerome, this is a natural follow on. It pairs naturally with Tommy and Co and with the later chapters of My Life and Times, where the same household material reappears in nonfiction form.