charlesdee
5/9/2019
Jerome had the gift of writing with a straight face the sort of prose he was simultaneously satirizing. The ghost stories his Christmas Eve guests tell are of the cozy variety, and his own supernatural encounter could be the result of too much whiskey punch. The ghostly stuff takes up only about a quarter of the book. The rest contains examples of the sorts of magazine essays that made Jerome one of the most popular writers of his day. They are a handy guide to what the late-nineteenth-century English reading public found funny.