Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome's Works: A Study

Before there was urban dictionary, there was Jerome K. Jerome, and Olof E. Bosson was among the first to take his slang seriously. This early 20th-century linguistic study dissects the vernacular crackling through Jerome's beloved comic novels, revealing how a master humorist weaponized the raw, irreverent speech of Victorian London's streets, pubs, and drawing rooms. Bosson argues that Jerome's genius lay not in elevated prose but in his ear for the ordinary: the slang that marked a speaker's class, the cant that betrayed a character's origins, the evolving meanings of words as they migrated from gutter to genteel conversation. Through close reading of works like Three Men in a Boat and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Bosson maps the linguistic underworld of late Victorian England, showing how Jerome captured the moment when social classes collided in language. This is a book for anyone who has ever wondered why certain words become forbidden, how taboo becomes trend, and what our slang says about who we are.