MIDDLE NAME ?

[AIB]

After reading Three Men in a Boat and the glossary introduction, I was rather intrigued by this middle name theory. It sounded highly unlikely to me and so I have checked the FreeBMD website. Although Jerome is registered as Klapka at his marriage in 1888, he is registered as just Jerome Clapp Jerome at his birth in 1859. :oops:

[sean wiles]

TRY TO GET A LOOK AT CHAPTER 1 IN jOSEPH CONNOLLY'S CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JEROME. There are some fascinating details about how Clapp was changed to Klapka some months after his birth,it was done in homage to a hungarian general (age 28!) living in the Jerome household at the time.
peculiar, indeed, but then ,who can say that ANY of Jeromes life was "ordinary". ?
Whats more, if you look into Alfred Moss' biography of Jerome, you will find that his fathers "Clapp" was even more strangely arrived at.......
sorry, spose you may not have a copy to hand right now.....well, turns out that Jeromes Father Jerome CLAPP Jerome, lived in a farm house above Bideford on the north side of the river , on the land of this farm a long time ago were found the remains of the burial(?) of a Dane who had owned the land about 1000AD, and his name was

                                   .............CLAPA  !!

am I boring you?  hello?  is anybody still awake out there??  sorry must just be me who's interested in all this stuff!!!

[Frank]

I can't resist getting in on this discussion, having searched for years for any real verification of the explanation for the strange middle name. The Alfred Moss biography is the initial source for the claim that JKJ was named for the Hungarian general, who, according to Moss, wrote his memoirs in the Jerome home at the end of 1849 and was a frequent visitor to the home.  My guess is that he received the information verbally from JKJ himself in the latter years of his life, and that it is more fiction than fact.  JKJ's birth certificate shows his middle name as Clapp, but it was not (as Connolly claims) changed a few months later.  When JKJ's mother died in 1875, a couple of months after his 16th birthday, the death certificate records the informant as "J.C. Jerome, son, present at the death."  My guess - an it strictly a guess - is that, when he started writing, JKJ came across Klapka's name (the general remained an exile in England the remainder of his life) and decided that it was more interesting than Clapp.  (He knew his Clapp cousins, mentioned below, so that might have given him the idea).

If Klapka had indeed stayed with the Jeromes while writing his memoirs in 1849, why did they wait ten years to honour him, rather than name their older son after him?

And, to go back a generation, Jerome Clapp Jerome was born Jerome Clapp, his father a silversmith named Benjamin Clapp.  And he used this name when he married Marguerite Jones in 1842.  But, working as a nonconformist minister, he probably decided that the label "Parson Clapp"
didn't sound flattering.  In somewhat the same manner, JCJ's older brother's sons, who were all doctors, added Woodforde to their name rather than try to pursue their profession as "Doctor Clapp."

As for Clapa the Dane - I think he is pure fiction!

[sean wiles]

OOPS! well , thats taken the fun out of that.
as JKJ may well have said,"why spoil a good story with the truth?"

[jesthepres]

More news on JKJ's name comes from a site called Lostlives and one Bill Greenwell (billgreenwell.com). My attention was drawn to this by a journalist from a newespaper based in Cirencester. The journalist had got hold of a story via a local estate agent that a certain house in the area had evidence (a carving, a piece of paper?) that Jerome Clapp Jerome conducted an affair with a lady in this house. The story has been passed down from owner to owner to the present day. The Wilts & Glos Journal is going to print its scoop within the next day or so.
I told the journalist that it might possibly be a legend referring to the elder Jerome Clapp, beacuse he lived in Cirencester and built the Independent Chapel there (later the local hospital). No, I was told, this was not Jerome Clapp the father but Jerome Clapp (our JKJ) to whom the evidence referred.
I initially poo-pooed the idea but remembering Frank's submission that JKJ was not christened JKJ, I backtracked. This is part of what Bill Greenwell reveals on his website. It looks as though he has consulted the census. It looks also as though several parts of JKJ's biography will have to be re-written. More when I have it:

Jerome Klapka Jerome - in later life known as 'JKJ' to his friends - wasn't exactly born with that name. But it isn't the palindromic symmetry of his name which is incorrect. His real middle name was, more mundanely, Clapp. At the time of JKJ's birth, on May 2nd, 1859, his father was also Jerome Clapp Jerome, but this too was an untruth. His father had been born plain Jerome Clapp, and had been mostly known as Clapp, a common Devonian surname. JKJ was the fourth child; he had two much elder sisters, both of them born with the surname Clapp, although their first names had the characteristic extravagance of parents who liked nothing better than to rifle through descriptions of minor saints and martyrs. Jerome Clapp had married Marguerette Maine Jones in 1842; her father had been a Swansea draper, his a silversmith in Bath; the couple married in Bideford, in North Devon. Their first daughter was Paulina Deodata Clapp, born in 1845; their second, born in 1848, was Blandina Dominica Clapp. Having ditched the Clapp, they saved up something even more spectacular for their third child, a son born in 1855, and given the alliterative double-whammy of Milton Melancthon Jerome.

When Jerome the younger was an infant, the family had a lodger, a Hungarian general called György Klapka, who was busy writing his memoirs. It is not known how a veteran of the Hungarian rising in the late 1840s came to be living in Walsall; but his name was snaffled by Jerome the elder and Marguerette, and grafted over their last son's middle C. Quite how much of this the future author of Three Men In A Boat knew about all this is unclear. He seems to have accepted the Klapka with ease; and besides, his parents had already begun, to distinguish between the two Jeromes by calling the younger one "Luther". (Martin Luther's closest sixteenth-century colleague was Philipp Melancthon. Melancthon and Luther. It was a cumbersome, non-conformist joke).

Greenwell then goes through JKJ's life pretty accurately and ends with this:

Jerome wrote seven novels, twenty-five plays, seventeen collections of short stories or articles, besides other uncollected essays and his autobiography. In his autobiography, he suggests that his mother's father was a prosperous Swansea solicitor. This wasn't the case. It may be that the wealth came from a generation further back, or perhaps an uncle. As the youngest child, he seems to have been confused about his parents. Nor is it clear on what date Klapka replaced Clapp as the middle name - the 1871 census shows him clearly as Jerome C. Jerome.

[Frank]

Well, Jeremy, this is fascinating!  I hope that you will be able to obtain and share with us the newspaper's "scoop."  The fact that the 1871 Census still gave J's middle initial as C confirms my earlier impression - and, as I commented in a previous submission, he is listed as J.C. Jerome on his mother's death certificate in 1875.  The first authenticated record of his having a middle initial K is in 1881, when The Lamp published his first article, showing him as J.K. Jerome.

[jesthepres]

Well - the Wilts and Glos Standard published their 'scoop'. The story was based on two signatures etched into a pane of glass in the bedroom window of a house in Cirencester, Glos. The house is on the market - so what better way of creating a bit of interest by publishing the story, handed down from owner to owner, that one of the signatures is that of Jerome K Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat. The other is the signature of a Mrs J Lawrence, the then owner of the house - and a married lady. The Wilts & Glos informant - and the journalist who contacted me - put 1 and 1 together and made 3.
They sent me a photo of the etched signature. It read 'Jerome Clapp' - which as we now know was JKJ's father's name until he left Appledore and lived in Walsall. The 'J' and final 'e' of 'Jerome' are very similar to the 'J' and final 'e' in JKJ's signature. However, the first 'e', the 'r' and 'm' are formed quite differently. I wrote to the Wilts & Glos saying that I was pretty sure it wasn't JKJ who etched his name, but his father. This is the reply I got:
'Maybe he didn't sign his full name because his hand got tired, I can't imagine it's too easy to scratch your name into glass. Although the fact that the first two letters are 'exact' does make me think it might be him not his dad. I know my signature varies little in the first two letters - try it yourself.
Also I've just spoken to the guy who sent the story and he said who is more likely to have an affair, a preacher or an arrogant, womanising author who stole someone elses wife in the first place!
The story of the affair itself was passed down through the family who have owned the house for several generations. It's up for sale at the moment which is why it has just come to light.
Anyway I'll make sure your comments get in it balances it up nicely.'

I replied as follows:
'Your informant knows a little but not very much. Always a dangerous basis for a factual story.  I know. I’m a writer and biographer.  There is absolutely no evidence at all (and I’ve been around the Jerome subject for a long time) that Jerome was arrogant. Quite the reverse, in fact, if you read his early stuff right through to his autobiography. I wonder where your informant got that impression? As to being a womaniser – total rubbish. Why does your man think Jerome "stole another man’s wife"? As a matter of fact, he didn’t (you’ll have to do your own research on that). But even if he did, how does that make him a womaniser? Dear oh dear - don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh? I suppose it might help sell someone’s house but I think it’s all pretty flimsy stuff.'

To be fair to the journalist, he took most of this on board and you can read the full thrilling story by going to www.wiltsglosstandard.co.uk and going to the 'News' section.

So your President has fought off the estate agent and successfully defended the honour of JKJ!!
By coincidence, the very same day as this saga, I was contacted by a Mr Peter Christie who has written a long, fascinating and superbly-researched essay on the early life of the Rev. Jerome Clapp. Among other revelations, JKJ's father left Appledore under a cloud, the cloud being rumours that he had fathered an illegitmate child...

The article will be published later this year and I have undertaken not to reproduce it until then. Mr Christie has kindly agreed to allow excerpts to be published in a forthcoming issue of Idle Thoughts. Many details of Jerome's family and early life will have to be re-written.