An
ancient river. The journey upstream of some impressionable young men
into a mysterious, challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the
source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is
pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest.
But this is not Heart of Darkness,
and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it's the Thames, and the
narrator is not Marlow but J, or Jerome, K Jerome. Published in 1889, 10
years before Conrad's novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog),
is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one,
too. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its
author.
Humour in
literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves. Nevertheless,
there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Three Men in a Boat
is one of these. Ostensibly the tale of three city clerks on a boating
trip, an account that sometimes masquerades, against its will, as a
travel guide, Three Men in a Boat hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.
What's
it all about? Jerome K Jerome would probably say his masterpiece was
"about one hundred and fifty pages", but I would argue that Three Men in a Boat
is about the cameraderie of youth, the absurdity of existence, camping
holidays, playing truant, comic songs, and the sweet memories of lost
time. You could also read it as an unconscious elegy for imperial
Britain. Did I omit to say that it also features a dog named
Montmorency? In short, like all the finest comic writing, it's about
everything and nothing.
Jerome K Jerome is more
or less forgotten now. He was a jobbing freelance literary journalist
who had just got married and needed to provide for his wife and family.
Encouraged by his new wife, Georgina, Jerome intended his account of a
boating holiday to be a popular travel guide for a booming market. In
late-Victorian England there was a vogue for recreational boating on the
Thames between Kingston and Oxford. This was the golden age of the Henley regatta.
Rowing boats, steam launches, even the occasional gondola: in the
Season, up to 800 vessels a day passed through Boulter's Lock near
Maidenhead. Here was an audience for a new river guide. In fact,
Jerome's descriptions of Hampton Court, Marlow and Medmenham are all
that survive from the original plan for a travel book.
But
something funny happened on the way to publication, perhaps because it
was first serialised in a magazine. Jerome's discursive comic voice took
over. The river journey he makes with his friends George and Harris
(and Montmorency) becomes the narrative line on which he hangs a
sequence of comic anecdotes loosely associated with the journey upriver.
Jerome's
themes are airily inconsequential and supremely English – boats,
fishing, the weather, the atrocities of English food and the
vicissitudes of suburban life – perfectly pitched in a light comic prose
whose influence can be detected later in the work of, among many, PG Wodehouse, James Thurber, and Nick Hornby. My favourite Jerome set piece is the episode with the tinned pineapple.
The
three mariners have had a long, hard day on the river. They reach their
evening mooring, dog-tired and ravenously hungry. When George unearths a
tin of pineapple chunks "we felt" writes Jerome, "that life was worth
living after all". They were, he says, all of them exceedingly fond of
pineapple. As the anticipation begins to build, he delivers the most
perfect sentence in a book already buoyant with light comedy. "We looked
at the picture on the tin," writes Jerome; "we thought of the juice."
Then
they discover that they have no tin-opener. What follows is a passage
of comic genius spun from nothing more – or less – than the banality of
everyday life. Read it. This passage ("a fearful battle") comes as the
brilliant climax to chapter 12.
Three Men in a Boat
is one of those rare classics that seems to come, as it were, out of
nowhere, and to defy the odds. Jerome K Jerome later wrote a hit West
End play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, but he never recaptured the mood of careless comic joy that aerates the pages of his immortal masterpiece.
A note on the text
Three Men in a Boat began life as a travel commission for the magazine Home Chimes.
Its
author later described what went wrong: "I did not know I was a
humorist," he confessed. "The book was to have been 'The Story of the
Thames', its scenery and history… I never got there. It seemed to be all
'humorous relief'. By grim determination I succeeded, before the end,
in writing a dozen or so slabs of history and working them in, one to
each chapter, and FW Robinson, who was publishing the book serially,
promptly slung them out… From the beginning he had objected to the
[since lost] title , and halfway through I hit upon Three Men in a Boat, because nothing else seemed right."
Jerome
sold book publication rights to the Bristol publisher, JW Arrowsmith,
who had been having a big success with a three-and-sixpenny
single-volume series (including work by Arthur Conan Doyle and Anthony
Hope), a new phenomenon which had begun to supplant the great Victorian
"three-decker" novels. The Education Act of 1870 had created a new mass
readership, and Jerome was eager to reach this new audience. On
publication, however, it seemed as if his cunning marketing plans had
gone awry. He had not allowed for the critics.
Jerome's
fascination with bank clerks and "the lower orders" was denounced up
and down. "One might have imagined," he later wrote in My Life and Times, "that the British Empire was in danger. The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and the Morning Post as an example of the sad results to be expected from the over-education of the lower orders…"
To
be specific, the reviews ranged from the vitriolic to the merely
hostile. The use of slang was condemned as "vulgar" and the book as a
whole abused as a shameless appeal to "'Arrys and 'Arriets" – sneering
critical terms for working-class Londoners. The magazine Punch dubbed Jerome K Jerome "'Arry K 'Arry".
Typically, the reading public paid absolutely no attention. Three Men in a Boat
went on selling in vast numbers, defying gravity. It was also promptly
pirated by unscrupulous American publishers. In Britain, Arrowsmith told
a friend: "I pay Jerome so much in royalties, I cannot imagine what
becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public
must eat them."
The first edition appeared in
August 1889, and remained in print until March 1909, when, after the
sale of some 200,000 copies, a second edition appeared. In his
introduction to this printing, Jerome states that he had probably sold
another million (pirated) copies in America.
The
book was also translated into many languages. The Russian edition was
particularly successful and became a standard school textbook, possibly
as a documentary account of life in the heart of the capitalist empire.
Since its publication, Three Men in a Boat has never been out of print. I'm unashamedly fond of it, and chose it as my "desert island" book on BBC Radio 4 in 2000.
Three more by Jerome K Jerome
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886); Three Men on the Bummel (1900); The Passing of the Third Floor Back, stories (1907), the play (1910).
