Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations.

The family fell into poverty owing to bad investments in the local mining industry, and debt collectors visited often, an experience that Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My Life and Times (1926).

He wished to go into politics or be a Man of Letters, but the death of his father when Jerome was 13 and of his mother when he was 15 forced him to quit his studies and find work to support himself.

[3] Jerome was inspired by his elder sister Blandina's love for the theatre, and he decided to try his hand at acting in 1877, under the stage name Harold Crichton.

[3] He joined a repertory theatre troupe that produced plays on a shoestring budget, often drawing on the actors' own meagre resources — Jerome was penniless at the time — to purchase costumes and props.

Finally, in 1885, he had some success with On the Stage — and Off (1885), a comic memoir of his experiences with the acting troupe, followed by Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), a collection of humorous essays which had previously appeared in the newly founded magazine, Home Chimes,[6] the same magazine that would later serialise Three Men in a Boat.

This allowed him to create comic (and non-sentimental) situations which were nonetheless intertwined with the history of the Thames region.

The book was nonetheless unable quite to recapture the sheer comic energy and historic rootedness of its celebrated predecessor (lacking as it does the unifying thread that is the river Thames itself) and it has enjoyed only modest success by comparison.

[10] Jerome volunteered to serve his country at the outbreak of the First World War, but being 55 years old, he was rejected by the British Army.

Jerome suffered a paralytic stroke and a cerebral haemorrhage in June 1927, on a motoring tour from Devon to London via Cheltenham and Northampton.

[11] He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes buried at St Mary's Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire.