Charactersketch of Jerome
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Jerome was heavily influenced by Romanticism, an aesthetic movement that focused on nature and the beauty of human emotion. Although he sends up some Romantic tropes elsewhere in the text, Jerome here appears to sincerely embrace nature's rejuvenating potential. The novel's frequent conflict between focus on human foibles and exultation of nature's possibility provides some of its most fascinating tonal shifts. No matter how cynical he is at times, Jerome clearly has an optimistic streak as well, as evidenced by passages like this.
It is also worth noting the phrase "far from the madding crowd", which is drawn from Thomas Gray's 1742 poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." That poem praises the beauty of nature and depicts rural graveyards as a good place for reflection. In Three Men in a Boat, Harris repeatedly asks to stop in rural churchyards to reflect, although J. and George always turn him down. The phrase later provided the title for Thomas Hardy's novel; Jerome pays homage to Hardy in other sections of the text as well.