In the Spring of 1889,
three men from London packed themselves into a little wooden boat and set off
on a tour of the upper Thames. The eventual result was one of the most
celebrated pieces of comedy that the English language has yet seen.
Jerome K. Jerome, one of the three men, was a journalist
and writer who had been intending to write a mere travel guide for the river,
but he struck on a much better idea. He had had a certain amount of success as
a writer with his series of humorous articles and columns, which were collected
under the title: Idle Thoughts of an Idle
Fellow, and their scatterbrained, anecdotal nature had allowed Jerome to
exercise his considerable wit. Rather than writing a flowery and rather dull
description of a popular tourist location, he instead turned it into the tale
of all the things that frequently go wrong with such boating trips; and thus a
comic classic was born.
Jerome, writing from his own point of view, goes on a
boating trip up the Thames with his friends George and Harris, bringing along
his mischievous dog Montmorency. While they make their way slowly up-river,
arguing constantly, a number of amusing anecdotes are seamlessly shoehorned
into each chapter, allowing the writer to colourfully illustrate his points,
and also to provide breaks from the rather slow pace of the story itself. It is
a style that works well, one that has ensured its longevity. The humour itself,
the real meat of the book, is of an oddly British kind; language-based, mildly
self-deprecating, and dealing ever with the innate foolishness of people.
Let
me explain; British Comedy as a label is rather a strange and misleading term, when you actually come to think about it. What
even is a “British Sense of Humour”? From my own experience, Britain has been
home to many different kinds of comedy for many generations, and I can see very
little that could be said to tie them all into a single, neat category enjoyed by a whole divided nation such as the British Isles, home to countless millions of individual people. If
there’s any factor that could be applied to the comedy spectrum as a whole, it
might be a sense of the avant-garde, of experimentation, and the willingness to
push the boat out in a new direction which has taken root since the end of the Second World War. Argue about that if you will, but there
is a little more to it than that. Truly great comedy recognises one important factor;
that the English language is ridiculous – especially in its most high-minded
and convoluted state. British culture is largely built on its great, sprawling
works of literature, both prose and poetry, written in such a high-level of language that a majority
of people find them to be near impenetrable. Take Paradise
Lost by John Milton, or The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, and try reading them. Very
few people have the ability, patience or inclination to delve into their
over-wordliness, and the problem continues with the classics of Victorian
literature. Even Dickens is a hard task for unprepared reader – and while great
merit can be found in their content, the language register is just too high,
too formal for many people to actually gain access to. Jerome K. Jerome, being
an educated Victorian, found a way to turn this on its head, to the reader's advantage. He has a
certain playfulness with the language, using its various subtleties and
eloquence to essentially make fun of itself. Here is an example of the sort of
thing that fills the pages of Three Men
in a Boat, when he recounts an episode of the time he collected some
especially repugnant cheeses for a friend of his and takes them back home with
him:
“I called for the cheeses, and took
them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed,
broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during
conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we
started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest
steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we turned
the corner. There the wind carried a whiff from the cheeses full on our steed.
It woke him up, and, with a snort of terror, he dashed off at three miles an
hour. The wind still blew in his direction, and before we reached the end of
the street he was laying himself out at the rate of nearly four miles an hour,
leaving the cripples and stout old ladies simply nowhere.”
Here
we have a uncomplicated little event. Jerome picks up some smelly cheese, and
hires a cab to take him to the railway station. The cab is drawn by a very old,
dilapidated horse, and as a consequence is incredibly slow. After smelling the
cheese, the horse is startled, and speeds up to almost walking pace. There is not
much that is inherently funny about this event itself; told in any other way,
it could just as easily be a tale of frustration, over the slowness of the
narrator’s ride, or even for something with a little tension in it, had the
writer chosen to use the slow horse as an obstacle to the protagonist’s goal.
But here the intention is humour; and with the full power of the English
language behind it, this sequence works magically. The horse is described, not
as a horse, but as a crippled sleepwalker in the most preposterously overinflated
terms, so unfit to bear the label of horse that Jerome’s writing is infused
with a sense of disbelief, and upon hearing this he cites the owner’s excitement as a
probably reason for it. Then there is the use of sarcasm, still continued in
this vaulted language, when the horse sped up by ‘dash[ing] off at three miles
an hour’, and using the phrase ‘laying himself out’ to describe its eventual
speed as nearly four miles an hour. A final comic emphasis at the end of the
paragraph is supplied by comparing the horse to outstripping the speeds of
‘cripples and stout old ladies’.
By
over-analysing this one small part of the book, I hope I have conveyed
something of the flavour of Jerome’s comic style, a style which moulds itself
into a number of forms throughout the book, each time to great effect. Merely
describing the events and characters does not work nearly so well in literary
comedy; it needs the flavour that only the telling of the story can actually
bring. Jerome’s voice gives it that special something, and it’s his command of
the language, his willingness to use it for its inherent ridiculousness that
gives the book that special something. If you can’t see my point about it,
having been presented only with a single paragraph, then fear not; the style
quickly rubs off on you as you read the book, and you will soon find yourself
chuckling at the lovely word-play. I hear tales that people have tried to adapt
the story for film and television, and I cannot help but shake my head in pity.
They have all clearly proven that they have missed the reason behind the book’s
charm; without Jerome’s narration, his wit, and his pacing, any film called Three Men in a Boat would be nothing
more than three men making a fool of themselves on multiple occasions; and that
could never come close to hearing about it in Jerome’s own words.
Another
thing that gives this book its charming quality is the use of chapter-notes at
the head of every chapter. This rather old-fashioned and unnecessary practice,
in which the author would leave a bullet-point summary of the main plot events
above the actual text itself, gains new life in Three Men in a Boat – for a book made up of short, tangentially
connected episodes, Jerome reveals his natural journalistic leanings by
effectively drawing the reader on, making them want to know more. Here are the
notes for Chapter 12:
“Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – Disadvantages
of living in same house with pair of lovers – A trying time for the English
nation – A night search for the picturesque – Homeless and houseless – Harris
prepares to die – An angel comes along – Effects of sudden joy on Harris – A
little supper – Lunch – High price for mustard – A fearful battle – Maidenhead
– Sailing – Three fishers – We are cursed.”
Taken
just like that, it is fragmentary and mostly nonsense. Certain phrases jump out
at you (‘Harris prepares to die’, ‘A trying time for the English nation’,
etc.), which just make you want to read more. Why was Harris preparing to die?
Was it to do with the ‘Homeless and houseless’ clause just prior, or for some
other, unrelated thing? What did the ‘fearful battle’ involve? And what, just
what, did Jerome think were the main disadvantages to living in the same house
as a pair of lovers? The chapter-notes are a lovely little touch, and are a
grand bonus to the novel overall, to be enjoyed as a light starter before
tucking into the main course of the chapter.
Whenever
the book needs to be criticised, it is fashionable to bring out the case of
some mild diversions that the book takes from its comedic intention. Throughout
the book, its original DNA as a travel guide can still be occasionally
glimpsed, as the writer devotes the occasional short paragraph to descriptions
of the riverside and towns along their journey. I personally like these
inclusions, for they make a picturesque and not overlong detour from the comic
anecdotes and mishaps of the three men, and it provides a nice little glimpse
into the world of Victorian England. What cannot be so easily vindicated are
one or two rather ‘serious’ sections to this book, a book which prides itself
on not being too serious. There’s a rather dull section in which the writer
romances the signing of the Magna Charta, and another recounting a fairy tale
about a knight lost in a forest, in both of which Jerome forgets that he is using
his language for a joke, and thus he ends up undermining himself a bit.
Fortunately these sections are few and far between, and do not damage the
integrity of the book as a whole. However, there is a section late in the story
when he writes about a subject that cannot be considered in anything other than
a dark light; the discovery of a woman who had committed suicide in the river.
All of Jerome’s comic drive is suddenly shut off at this moment, and he finds
himself recounting the sad story of the woman in question – how she fell
pregnant out of wedlock, was abandoned by her family, fell into poverty, and
whose only escape from the society that had abandoned her was to kill herself.
It hits the reader like an icy knife in the gut, yet Jerome, normally a little
unskilled when writing about serious matters, gives this one section a sense of
thoughtfulness and dignity. The sad fact is that the suicide of stigmatised
women in Victorian society was not an uncommon occurrence, and it is all the
more evident here when the writer’s uses the phrase ‘that old, vulgar tragedy’,
or ‘Rather a hackneyed story’ as it is referred to in the chapter-notes.
Fortunately the chapter ends early not long after the matter has been recounted,
and the book is able to recover its comic light-heartedness in the last few
sections.
Really,
the crux of what this book is about is a combination of various levels of
English foolishness. Great Britain in the late 19th century was one
of the most powerful and advanced nations the world had known up to that point,
ruling a vast colonial empire that stretched to every continent, had shipping
that ran through every sea, and which prided itself on its moral, scientific
and artistic superiority. But British Comedy, if it has a frequent
subject-matter, is in the foolishness of its people. There is a deep sense of
shame in British society; despite all the pride and pretensions, we really know
we’re not great, and to have held this position of global hegemony was a
strange blip in our recent history. Even at the time, people were aware of
this, and so here we have a late 19th century book which delves into
the lives of some of the more ordinary of the country’s inhabitants, and they
are not what we should expect from the people who were meant to inhabit this
supposedly great nation. J., Harris and George are idle young men who have
supreme difficulty managing a boat, who swear and argue over trifling matters,
who drink, despite claiming to be moral Christian men, and whose dog
Montmorency is badly behaved and ‘born with about four times as much original
sin in [him] than other dogs are’.
The
characters are good; there is the narrator, J. himself, whose high-minded and
over-poetic nature is evident in the writing itself, through which he is
frequently undone thanks to the author’s almost satirical take on the language,
as much as by the antics and words of his friends George and Harris. The other
two men are there to argue with him, to show up the foolishness of the
narrator’s character by being his mirror images and his antagonists, and it
demonstrates what real friendship is about, when men who generally treat
each-other like hated rivals end up going on a boat trip together. The British
love of their dogs is very much in evidence here, for Montmorency is the animal
spirit of every badly-behaved-yet-beloved-pet that has ever made their owner’s
lives less dull, and Jeromes thoughts on the matter might as well be scripture
where that is concerned. The magical phrase with which he begins his story of
when Montmorency first arrived in his company: ‘When first he came to live at
my expense...’ should strike the heart of everybody who has ever kept a dog.
Three Men in a Boat saw
incredible success when it was first released, its popularity enduring even
unto today, which shows the critics of the day how wrong they were when they
derided it. Being something meant to poke fun at the high-minded English
mentality, naturally they would not agree with it, but the newly enfranchised
literate working-classes of the day found its taste more than palatable. At the
end of the day, that’s all that mattered. There was a sequel, too; eleven years
later arrived Three Men on the Bummel,
starring the same characters with the same travelogue premise, only this time
with bicycles in the Black Forest of Germany. This one did not become a
classic, like its venerable predecessor, but it is equally amusing in places,
and is always worthy of reading by an appreciator of Jerome’s work.
In
conclusion then, you must read Three Men
in a Boat. Nobody can experience a truly complete and wonderful life
without having done so, for it is hilarious, insightful, beautiful, and an
indispensible piece of tradition. It is not too long, is easy to read despite
its Victorian language, and can be appreciated over and over again with as much
enjoyment as before.
Three Books in a Biblioat
Jerome, Jerome K. Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. Everyman’s
Library: Bungay. (1983 [first published 1886])
“. Three Men in a Boat. Alan Sutton: Bristol. (1989 [first published
1889])
“. Three Men on the Bummel. Alan Sutton: Guernsey. (1982 [first
published 1900])
