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(‘In married life,’ J. explains to George, ‘the man proposes, the wife submits. It is her duty; all religion teaches it’). Defiant behind their wives’ backs, they long to get away with their men friends, but don’t quite know how to broach the matter; when Mrs J. announces that she too would like some time to herself, J. feels quite bruised and affronted. Domestic diplomacy behind them at last, they decide to make a bicycling tour of Germany; and much of the fascination of their ensuing adventures lies in Jerome’s perceptive, and disconcertingly prophetic, view of the Wilhelmine Germans as a people in whom kindliness and a passion for order are combined with passivity, a taste for brutality and authoritarian rule.
    Three Men on the Bummel
was published in 1900, and that same year Jerome took his family to live in Dresden. Its charms, he declared, were ‘more solidly German, and more lasting’ than those of Paris – yet another manifestation of the prevailing notion, inflamed by the Romantics and by philosophers like Nietszche and Herder, that German culture was somehow more profound and more rooted than the articulate but superficial Latin varieties.Jerome’s admiration for his hosts was reciprocated: a club was formed in his honour, and his new book became a set text in German schools.
    Back in England, Jerome was at last taken seriously by the critics when
Paul Kelver
was published in 1902. The
Times Literary Supplement
compared it, favourably, with Olive Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm
, and suggested that although
Three Men in a Boat
had been the literary equivalent of a millstone round its author’s neck, his new novel displayed ‘shrewd observations of a certain habit of mind and cast of character’. He visited St Petersburg, skied in Switzerland with Conan Doyle, and, in 1908, made his first lecture tour of America, visiting every state of the union and calling on the President, Theodore Roosevelt, who – or so it was claimed – happened to be reading one of his books at the time.
    Jerome enjoyed public speaking, and was not afraid of making his views known, in person and in print. While editing
Today
he had condemned Turkish massacres of the Armenians; he campaigned on behalf of the badly-off, including his fellow-writers; a keen animal-lover, he berated the Belfast City corporation for its treatment of its tram-horses. His most dramatic outburst occurred in 1913, on his second tour of America. After one of his public readings, in Tennessee, he was moved to protest against the lynching of Negroes in the Southern states. ‘The treatment of the Negro calls to Heaven for redress,’ he wrote in
My Life and Times
. ‘I have sat with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roast alive; how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inwards as the flames crept upwards till nothing could be seen but two white balls… These burnings, these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pincers can only be done to glut some hideous lust for cruelty.’ This is forceful writing, strongly felt, and provides further evidence of Jerome’s awareness of the harsher sides of human nature. After he’d finished his tirade, he ‘sat down in silence. It was quite a time before anybody moved. Then they all got up at the same moment, and moved towards the door.’
    Round-faced and ruddy, with large, straight features, dark eyes and a thatch of thick white hair, Jerome in his fifties and sixties looked more like a benign English farmer than a desk-bound literary man. Conservative in dress, he continued to favour the tubular trousers, high-buttoned jackets and virulent tweeds of a late-Victorian man-about-town. On one occasion he was attacked by suffragettes who had mistaken him for Mr Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, and had to be escorted to safety by two policemen. He had a