John Ingerfield, and Other Stories

The title story: a hard Limehouse oil-and-tallow refiner in the days of George the Third marries a well-born girl as a matter of business, and each finds out what the other is made of when typhus breaks out among his own workpeople. With it, four more — a ghost story from a Norwegian mountain saeter, a boy's first night at a music hall, a set of silhouettes from memory, and the comedy of a public-house lease. Jerome was orphaned at fifteen and worked as a railway clerk and an actor before Three Men in a Boat, which he meant seriously; this 1894 collection is the other Jerome. Fifty-one plates of harbour light and broken weather by painters from Grimshaw to Sisley give these river and coastal tales the atmosphere they were written in.