Childhood & Early Years

• Jerome Klapka Jerome was born on 2 May 1859 in Caldmore, now a part of the industrial town of Walsall in Staffordshire. At birth, he was registered as Jerome Clapp Jerome; but later Clapp was changed into Klapka after the exiled Hungarian general and family friend, György Klapka.
• His father, Jerome Clapp, was a nonconformist preacher, and owned a coalmine on Cannock Chase. Before that, he had tried farming and stone quarrying in Devonshire.
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  Jerome’s mother, Marguerite Jones, was the daughter of a prosperous Swansea solicitor. She had brought in considerable dowry, which his father had invested in the coal mine. Coming from heroic Welsh nonconformist stock, she never lost her faith in spite of repeated failures in family fortune.
• Jerome Jr. was born at Belsize House, located on the corner of Bradford Street and Caldmore Road. He was his parents’ fourth child, having two elder sisters named Paulina Deodata and Blandina Dominica, and one elder brother named, Milton Melanchthon, who died at the age of six.
• Initially, they were quite well off. But on the night of Jerome’s first birthday, his father gently woke up his mother to say that his coalmine had been flooded and that he was now a ruined man with just a few hundred pounds left.
• In 1861, he shifted his family to a smaller house in Stourbridge and moved alone to London. There he set up a wholesale iron mongering business, which did not do as well as he expected. Consequently, he did not call for his family, living on 5 shillings a week.
• When Jerome was four years old, his mother came to know about his father’s condition and moved her family to London. There, they set up their home in a small house on Sussex Street in Poplar, East London.
• In Poplar, Jerome grew up surrounded by the poorer section of the society, who detested him for his gentlemanly upbringing and tried to bully him. Indeed, the environment there was anything but congenial and in his biography, Jerome held it responsible for his brooding and melancholy disposition.
• Possibly in January 1869, just before his tenth birthday, young Jerome gained admission at the Philological School, which later became known as Marylebone Grammar School. Although he dreamed big, aspiring to be a man of letters or a renowned politician, his father’s death in 1872 put an end to it.