The Idler’s Club: Humor and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse

The first issue of the Idler was published in February 1892 under the editorship of Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr. This illustrated monthly magazine offered a wide variety of material, from serial fiction and short stories to autobiographical sketches and poetry. Although less well-known now than the Strand Magazine, the Idler was received in some quarters as a potential rival to that popular periodical and reported circulation figures indicate its success.1 That it ran until 1911 is further evidence of that success, although it saw changes in editors attendant on, among other things, Jerome’s financial misfortunes. Much of the periodical’s content was humorous, one such example being the “Idler’s Club,” a regular collaborative, conversational column that commenced with the first issue. In many ways it mimicked club talk, as if the reader was listening in as a member. This column’s form is the springboard for Laura Kasson Fiss’s The Idler’s Club: Humor and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse, a welcome development in scholarship on readers and belonging.For Fiss, both humor and select social clubs are built on contradiction: humor through its dependence on opposing meanings, clubs in that they encourage a sense of belonging whilst appearing exclusive. In analyzing literary representations of clubs, her book centers on these connected paradoxes and draws on Benedict Anderson’s conception of “imagined communities” to explore what turn-of-the century representations of clubs can tell us about the social role of humor: “Rather than break the windows of the club from outside, as rioters did in 1886, the Idlers imaginatively invited all readers to put their feet up on the mantelpiece” (25). In investigating clubs’ representational functions, Fiss’s study recovers neglected writers and neglected works by canonical authors. These writers are largely connected by their association with the Idler: Israel Zangwill and Barry Pain joined Jerome and Barr in the “Idler’s Club” column; Arthur Conan Doyle contributed to the magazine and had many social connections with its key players; J. M. Barrie and P. G. Wodehouse were members of the Idlers’ wider social circle. Fiss expands this group to include Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional clubs; they play what she calls a “supporting role” (3). Stevenson wrote an entry for the Idler’s “My First Book” section, and Fiss describes him as an “aspirational contact” for the Idlers (138). Chesterton, despite having little social connection with the circle, first published the story Fiss discusses, The Club of Queer Trades, serially in the Idler. Sayers, however, had no links to the periodical. The Idlers, as Fiss labels them collectively, are a slippery group. The dispersal throughout the chapters of details about the authors and their complex connections means the threads of the intertwined biographies become a little difficult to keep hold of at times. Nonetheless, they all devised fictional clubs (Barrie also included clubs in his memoirs) and the study’s analysis of the Idlers’ writing on clubs expands our understanding of the ways in which humor can be put to work to reveal the operation of social connections.Periodicals scholars will find the introduction and first two chapters most rewarding. Fiss’s introduction positions the Idler within its publishing context, in particular both that of New Journalism and the work of the “New Humorists,” and then details the connections between the club and print culture more generally. Fiss outlines the history of clubs’ associations with print and argues that the “Idlers’ Club” continued, but also innovated, a tradition of representing periodical staff as a club engaged in idle conversation. Chapter 1 develops Fiss’s 2016 article on this column,2 providing a detailed discussion of the column’s composition and changes from its beginnings in the first issue of the periodical to 1901 (in 1902 Barr bought the magazine back after it went through a variety of editors and the column shifted to single, but changing, authorship). Fiss’s interest is in the ways in which the collaborative column contributed to the relationship between the magazine and its readers through the imaginary, inclusive space it created. She argues that it offsets the anonymity of mass readership in allowing its readers to participate imaginatively in the club, its humor contributing to that balance between ubiquity and exclusivity. Chapter 2 offers an analysis of literary representations of the press in contrast to clubs: Fiss moves away from the Idler but stays with periodicals as she considers Jerome’s 1904 novel Tommy and Co. The novel’s central figure, the androgynous newspaperwoman Tommy who joins the staff of the fictional magazine Good Humour, enables Jerome to contrast club and newsroom. Fiss analyses Jerome’s depiction of Tommy as essential to Good Humour and his creation of the immature male membership of the Autolycus Club as a contrast. With a focus on gender and women journalists (both fictional and in the Idler), Fiss demonstrates how Jerome presents periodicals as superior to the club, in their more extensive inclusivity.The remaining chapters operate as case studies analyzing differing representations of clubs, all continuing to think in one way or another about conflicting meaning in humor alongside the contradictions in clubs. This thinking is exemplified in Fiss’s claim: “We want to belong to clubs. We think clubs are pernicious. All these conflicting attitudes towards clubs may exist within a single person; they certainly exist within the mass reading public. Moreover, the very act of joking about clubs and the social order they represent claims power for author and reader alike” (24). Each chapter explores a facet of that. That so many of the works discussed have been critically neglected leads Fiss to focus on extensive exposition of plots at times. However, an introduction to so much understudied writing on clubs will be well-received by those interested in belonging, exclusion, and social mobility. Chapter 3 concerns humorous club stories by Zangwill and Pain. Fiss finds these stories to explore the contradictory nature of rules in relation to the club and social mobility more widely, that such rules are both “utopian and fundamentally untenable” (91). She demonstrates how humor is the means by which readers can view the club from within and thus consider the ridiculousness of exclusivity. The texts studied in chapter 4 take a more sinister turn; Fiss considers fictional clubs threatening male friendship in the detective stories of Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and Sayers. Highlighting the involvement of the reader in this particular genre, she suggests there are limits to the relationships these fictions can develop with readers: she finds that the stories reflect a suspicion of the possibility of clubs regulating or structuring friendship. The final two chapters have a particular focus on class. In chapter 5 Fiss explores “unclubbability” in relation to the work of Barrie, who defined himself as unclubbable, inclined to social awkwardness. The chapter proposes this unclubbability was a pose, a mask of Barrie’s social mobility while his writing suggests there could be community in such a pose. Chapter 6 returns to ideas about clubs and readers developed in the first chapter; it focuses on Wodehouse’s clubs, in particular the Drones Club, which appeared across multiple stories. Fiss presents Wodehouse’s club writing as an intensification of the “Idler’s Club”: she describes it as a cozy space to which readers can imaginatively belong, while at the same time being so silly that no one would mind feeling excluded.Fiss’s conclusion is worth reflecting on. She ends her study with a timely invitation for us to consider our own “clubs”: she proposes that we can learn from the Idlers and should further reinforce our scholarly communities’ inclusivity and hospitality. At a time when our institutions face multiple challenges, and traditional academic communities (at least in some disciplines) seem doomed to shrink or even disperse, reflection on the welcome we offer among our wider networks to maintain and grow our “clubs” seems worthwhile.To conclude, Fiss’s critical attention on the “Idler’s Club” column as shaping the Idler’s relationship with its readers is a welcome addition to periodical studies and the coincidences, collisions, and confluences within this magazine deserve further study. The useful appendix “The Numbers on Women in the ‘Idler’s Club’” presents her research data on contributors to the collaborative column and could offer a starting point for future research on women’s contribution to journalism at the turn of the century or on other networks (or “clubs”) across periodicals. Overall, The Idler’s Club, particularly in its attention to humor, is an interesting and worthwhile intervention in the scholarship on authors’ (both collaborative and individual) construction of readers’ participation in “imagined communities.”

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