"An exacting public": Jerome K. Jerome and the new humour

Throughout the 1890s Jerome K. Jerome exploited his ambivalent position as the most successful of the ‘new humourists’; inviting readers of his journal To-day to see themselves as loyal members of a club, he used humour as both an agent of, and a weapon against, social disruption. Conflicted feelings about his own literary status haunt Jerome’s fin de siècle writing. But significantly the eponymous hero of Paul Kelver (1902), who is likened to David Copperfield and yet fails to be Dickens, is finally advised, ‘You are here to make us laugh. Get on with your work, you confounded young idiot!’