With me, it was my liver that was out of order. […] I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general disinclination to work of any kind." What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

During these last years Jerome spent more time at his farmhouse in Ewelme near Wallingford. Chilvers: an improbable comedy imagined by Jerome K. While reintroducing the same characters in the setting of a foreign bicycle tour the book was nonetheless unable to capture the life-force and historic roots of its predecessor and it enjoyed only a mild success.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889).