Introduction
Critics tried to sink Jerome K. Jerome's comic classic, Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog! ), when it appeared in 1889. The late-Victorian-era reading public, however, made the lighthearted depiction of a Thames River journey into a bestseller and launched Jerome on a long and successful career as author, playwright, and editor. Three Men in a Boat remains one of the most widely read and beloved works of British fiction. The novel's global popularity has proven unsinkable. Three Men in a Boat has never fallen out of print and its style has influenced generations of British writers, from P.G. Wodehouse to Douglas Adams. The book has been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Swedish, and Russian, and its colloquial tone has been used to teach English worldwide. Radio, film, and stage adaptations of Jerome's timeless story have appeared with regularity since the 1920s, including a 1975 teleplay by Tom Stoppard. Jerome, a self-proclaimed "idler," would surely be surprised by the busy post-publication lives led by his famous trio and their dog.
Despite his literary evocations of leisure, Jerome's own life was marked by labor and deprivation from an early age. He was born into a deeply religious family of Nonconformists (Protestants who did not join the Anglican church) in Walsall, Staffordshire, in 1859. His preacher father, also named Jerome, gave his youngest child the unusual middle name Klapka in honor of a Hungarian general, George Klapka, who once lived with the Jeromes and became a family friend. It is tempting to suspect that growing up in a household of Jerome Jeromes and Hungarian expatriates encouraged theauthor's nascent talent for bemused observations of everyday life. After the Reverend Jerome embarked on a series of failed business schemes, the newly impoverished family moved to cramped quarters in London's crime-ridden East End. At the age of ten, Jerome began his formal education at a school located a great distance from his home, which necessitated a lonely and tiring daily commute. He recalled in his autobiographical novel, Paul Kelver (1902), that it was on one such cross-town journey that he met Charles Dickens and expressed to the great author his own intention of becoming a writer. Whether the story is true or not, Dickens would likely have appreciated a chance meeting with an intelligent young boy of reduced circumstances set on pursuing the literary life. What is certain is that Jerome's childhood came to an abrupt and fittingly Dickensian end when he was orphaned at the age of fourteen following the untimely deaths of his father and mother. The hard-working youth left school to take up a series of unhappy clerkships. He eventually turned to eking out a living as an actor in a traveling stage company.
Three years treading the boards in provincial theaters exhausted Jerome, who returned to London destitute and demoralized. But the would-be actor soon turned his abortive stage career into the first of his many published triumphs. After several painful rejections, Jerome's humorous essays on the theater finally caught the attention of a small periodical, The Play. The initial interest in his personal, backstage reminiscences led to the publication and modest success of his first collection, On the Stage-And Off (1885). A year later a second volume of essays appeared, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. Jerome's figure of an idler is akin to a Victorian "slacker," one who shirks work in order to better comment on the recline and sprawl of the British Empire. With typical insouciance, Jerome affectionately dedicated his book of comic philosophizing to a "very dear and well-beloved friend"- his pipe. The publication of his "idle thoughts" demonstrated that Jerome had been very busy refining the garrulous style of genial wit and wisdom that became his trademark.
The contradiction between Jerome's professed idleness and his actual industry was only one of the internal tensions that came to define his later work. He quickly became associated with the "new humour," originally a term of derision meted out by London's notoriously venomous critics. His longtime friend, writer and ideologue Israel Zangwill, explained that the "new humourists" created characters and stories that "stand for comedy as well as for tragedy." Given the deprivations Jerome faced as a child and the hardships he endured as a young adult, it is not surprising that his humor was occasionally infused with underlying sorrow. What is striking, however, is that the once homeless and desperate Jerome went on to epitomize the aspirations and increasing confidence of the fin de siècle British middle class.
Jerome never envisioned the enduring popularity of Three Men in a Boat when he began publishing installments in the periodical Home Chimes in 1888. In fact, Jerome had not planned to write a comic work at all. Originally intending to write a travelogue recording the history of the Thames River, Jerome found that the episodic nature of a lazy journey accommodated the sort of humorous digressions and witty reflections that had first made his name. As he revised his book, he shifted the emphasis from landscape to the narrative stylings of J., a thinly-veiled stand-in for Jerome himself. An idler who exhibits a "general disinclination to work of any kind," J. also holds a jaundiced view of society, which leaves him "yearn[ing] for the good old days, when you could go about and tell people what you thought of them with a hatchet and a bow and arrows."
Two other members of the boating party, George and Harris, also have their real-life counterparts. The fictional George, who "goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two," was based on Jerome's fellow theater-goer and old friend from his dosshouse days, George Wingrave, who had become a bank manager. Their companion, Harris, appears as an inveterate drinker who even in Paradise would likely find "a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar." Jerome's depiction of a bibulous Harris is an inside joke. The real Harris, a theater enthusiast named Carl Hentschel, was not fond of alcohol. Montmorency, a small fox terrier who steals several scenes in the novel, appears to be "born with about four times as much original sin in [him] as other dogs are." Montmorency gets into scraps with cats and stray curs, loses a battle with a kettle, howls at George's banjo recital, donates a water rat to the trio's Irish stew, and generally makes a nuisance of himself. As vivid a canine as ever-appeared in literature, Montmorency was in fact wholly conjured to life by Jerome's imagination.
The cheeky preface to Three Men in a Boat states that the book purports to "form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them; and, for this, no extra charge has been made." Indeed, the real-life triumvirate of Jerome, Wingrave, and Hentschel did set out on a trip up the Thames in the spring of 1889, though they had made several river excursions before. Boating was the latest recreational craze at the time, and Jerome sought to capitalize on the novelty with his travelogue. Jerome's resulting chronicle of the trip retains some elements of his intended "story of the Thames," notably his rambling comments on riverside towns and their attractions. But the soul of the book remains the vernacular style of the narrator. Many of Jerome's amusing anecdotes and recollections of the young friends' foibles are undoubtedly based on real events and are embellished with a skill reminiscent of the great American yarn-spinners Mark Twain and Josh Billings.
Hallmarks of Jerome's digressive style include the use of understatement, the matter-of-fact invocation of absurd logic, the piling up of exaggerations, and the attribution of emotion to the inanimate. George's profuse cursing is euphemistically down-played as "express[ing] wishes and desires concerning Harris's fate in this world and the next that would have made a thoughtful man shudder." When lost at night, the friends consider "assaulting a policeman" in order to have "a night's lodging in the station-house," but they reject the proposition, fearful that he would hit them back without locking them up! A dispute over whether to pack cheese for the trip devolves into a ridiculous tale of cheeses so ripe that they could not even be buried without the coroner raising a "fearful fuss. . .[saying] it was a plot to deprive him of his living by waking up the corpses." Several hilarious episodes detail the threesome's tussles with malicious objects such as tents, tow lines, tea kettles, and a particularly contrary tin of pineapple: "We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. [. . .] There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious."
The many mishaps unfold in brief chapters headed by diary-like encapsulations. This technique, combined with the first-person narration and its highly colloquial language, bolsters the sense that Jerome's tale is faithful to the human comedy of real men seeking to escape the pressures of an industrialized society. In Three Men in a Boat, Jerome crafted an idyll of idleness whose humor derived from the misadventures of the late-Victorian Everyman. Literary scholar Donald Gray has commented that Victorian laughter functioned "to furnish a holiday from taking things and ideas seriously." Jerome dramatizes the unimportance of being earnest when his narrator flippantly remarks, "I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." His rambling accounts of his characters' circuitous progress, their plunges into the river, and their hopelessly misguided navigations of Hampton Court's famed hedge maze, provided Jerome's contemporaries with a much-needed vacation from solemnity.
At a time when critics and educators still demanded that literature present some elevating moral, Jerome merely paid lip-service to "the lesson that the story teaches." He drifted instead from commentary on "the natural cussedness of things in general" upon arising too early on vacation, to the "natural obstinacy of all things in this world," when a boat fails to obey its captains. Readers were not accustomed to descriptions of their own frustrations in a vernacular that comically deflated the significance of their grievances. The novelty of Jerome's prose and the fresh depiction of middle-class mores helped make Three Men in a Boat a fabulous success and the author a wealthy man. As usual, the critics were less kind, lambasting Jerome for lowbrow sentimentality, vulgarity, his use of slang, and the "poverty of the life [the book] only too faithfully reflects." For readers who were flattered to see their own human failings described in print, such 'faithful reflection' was exactly the point. The reviews stung Jerome, who never completely abandoned the pieties of his youth. He was baffled by critics responding to his book's popularity as if "the British Empire was in danger."
Writing nearly seventy years after Three Men in a Boat was published, critic V. S. Pritchett praised Jerome for seeing "that one of the funniest things a human being has is his conscience." Indeed, Jerome's characters' hypocrisies, their pettiness, and their ironic observations throw into comic relief fundamental truths of human nature. J. bemoans uncharitable holiday-makers: "I don't know why it should be, but everybody is always so exceptionally irritable on the river." He then undercuts his musings with the revelation that: "When another boat gets in my way, I feel I want to take an oar and kill all the people in it." Here, a lack of self-awareness reveals an essential selfishness common to everyone. Perhaps such revelations are responsible for the long-standing appeal of Jerome's work across the globe.
Although Jerome produced literary works well into the twentieth century, he was never able to escape the notoriety of Three Men in a Boat. A sequel set during a cycling trip in Germany, Three Men on the Bummel (1900), reunited the characters and achieved considerable success. Jerome lectured and traveled widely, and even enlisted in the French army during World War I at the age of fifty-seven as an ambulance driver. He penned an entertaining account of his early struggles and later triumphs in My Life and Times (1926). For most of his professional life, he lived with his wife, Georgina, and daughter in London and socialized with a cadre of famous, forward-thinking intellectuals, including Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. Jerome continued to write popular books, well-received plays, such as The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1907), and edit publications, most notably The Idler, until his death from a stroke in 1927. His own verdict on his future legacy has proven accurate: "I may come to be quite a swell dead author." While American literature rhapsodizes over epic journeys on the road or down the mighty Mississippi, the British canon celebrates Jerome's more modest, but equally captivating narrative of a voyage undertaken by three men in a boat - to say nothing of the dog - one spring over a hundred years ago.
Adam Rovner holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University. He has lectured and published articles on comic literature and humor theory for both popular and academic audiences.
