Three Men in a Boat by Jerome Klapka Jerome. Reviewed by Rae West. (With Three Men on the Bummel)

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Jerome Klapka Jerome (1889) Three Men in a Boat (& Three Men on the Bummel)

Very Long Review by 'Rerevisionist' 13-30 October 2015

Victorian England; Could a Shrewd Observer Detect Impending Doom, in this One Hit Wonder? Includes Jewish and European Influences

1889 domestic life in England. This was before television; and before radio and cinema. Before colour photographs, refrigeration, telephones. Before commercial electric light; gas lights were at that time leading-edge recent inventions. No motor-cars; London had many horse-drawn cabs, and of course horses needed such things as livery stables and horse tack and food and shoes—and disposal facilities. Flying machines were widely believed to be an impossibility. The very first ocean liners dated from about 40 years earlier; clippers (fast sailing ships) had died out 20 years earlier, after the Suez Canal removed their raison d'être; iron ships, both coal steamers and sailing ships, scene-set in the novels (for example) by Joseph Conrad, W. W. Jacobs, and Jack London, were a vast global haulage industry. A threat to British sea power was 'unthinkable': so Bertrand Russell wrote looking back—not knowing that the sea power appears to have been Jewish, not British.

Cheap paper was being engineered; of the results, 'Tit-Bits' existed, with 'Comic Cuts' soon about to come. 'The Sporting Times', or Pink 'Un, had existed for years. It would be more than 60 years before the habit of 'watching' television, for four or five hours an evening, dulled the wits of masses of people.

The railways were then the fastest-ever inland travel system. They led to railway inns near stations, access even to small villages, the growth of seaside resorts, J. M. W. Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, the rural-sounding east London stations from Bethnal Green north to Cambridge Heath, London Fields, and Hackney Downs. And W. H. Smith's railway station bookstalls. And to worries about where the hell am I: J's Waterloo station has a joke bribe to an engine driver for reassurance.

'Three Men in a Boat' (August 1889) sold 'in Great Britain and her colonies' slightly above 10,000 copies averaged per year for 20 years. Or so the publisher thought: J. K. Jerome thought a million copies had sold in the USA, but his book predated (I think) the 1891 International Copyright Act.

At the time—and noted in passing within that book—Gilbert and Sullivan's English comic operas made fun of Judges, modern Major-Generals, and the Ruler of the Queen's Navee (in Sir Joseph Porter's Song). But J says nothing about high status people: a lampoon of Church of England sermons could have been very amusing. Or company promoters for African mines. Or Oxbridge. Or Law Lords. But there's nothing at all. J. K. Jerome left school at 14 and no doubt was overawed. Three Men in a Boat was written when he was twice that age.
Operettas are a close equivalent to Three Men in a Boat: episodic, as after, all everyday life can be; with careful verbal arrangements to summon the appropriate comedic moods; and with a few sad or tragic or majestic counterpoints as a nod to some aspects of the world.

Three Men in a Boat dodges much of the technical problem of precise description by personifying nature: 'Sunlight is the life-blood of nature' is a tiny example. Here's a longer, impressive, extract from such a passage:

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last. From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rearguard of the night, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness. ...

Harris said: "How about when it rained?"—bathos of course is necessary here, and Jerome deploys it often enough. (The three men are J himself, George the bank clerk, Harris, and a noisy fox terrier named Montmorency. I've just read that Keith Richards calls his dog 'syphilis'—Five men and a disease?). J's main narrative device is speech: quotations or reconstructions, internal monologues, and reports, both current and stories of some time ago—J includes quite a few stories of types of the river fisherman's yarn, and the two men in one bed throwing each other out, and the wetted shirt recognised as the other man's. His internalised speech mostly recounts irritations between the men as they wrestle emotionally with each other and with an indifferent universe.
All these digressions are suited to reading aloud: one can imagine tears of laughter, and recollections of how we laughed, over the Hampton Court maze account.

Worth noting that 'Harris' is a surname often taken by by Jews keen on concealment. Jerome K Jerome must have known. It's tantalising to speculate on detail about England which may have been common currency to Jews; the Magna Carta material, for example. I'm surprised how little description J puts into his book. The dog, and Harris's blazer, are described in greater detail than any of the three men. Harris's twelve stone is regarded as 'big'; this may be a comment on the unindustrialised diet of the times. Possibly the paucity of description is related to J's early educational terminus: he may simply not have known technical terms for architecture, for example. Or laws: Land tenure? Riparian law? Swan-upping? There's quite a contrast with (say) Jack London's highly-detailed accounts of physiologies and physiognomies.
The clue may be in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, published a few years earlier, which contains many similar situations to Three Men in a Boat, but all expressed in the form of autobiographical meditational monologues. Wrapping these thoughts (but not those on poverty and pawn-shops) with bodily forms undeniably expands into a more appealing package.

Jerome, confident that emotions are similar between types of people, liked colloquial speech: 'What the eye does not see the stomach does not get upset over' for example. Here's an example of a whole cluster of short popular phrases: 'So I set my face against a sea trip. Not, I explained, upon my own account. I was never queer. But I was afraid for George. George said he should be all right, and would rather like it, but he would advise Harris and me not to think of it, as he felt sure we should both be ill. Harris said that, to himself, it was always a mystery how people managed to get sick at sea - ...'

It's tempting to try to find comparisons with other novels which have a haunting and lasting quality. Perhaps these things are intrinsically one-off and isolated, like the song A Whiter Shade of Pale. Could this be autobiographical? The author of the world's best ever autobiography could not, one imagines, ever write another one. I scribbled down some English novels: Day's History of Sandford and Merton (1783ish); Valentine Vox (Cockton, 1840ish); Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures (Jerrold, 1845ish); Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857); Erewhon (Butler; 1872); Diary of a Nobody (Grossmiths, 1892); maybe Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm, 1911) and other later works, but didn't find compelling lessons apart from avoiding unpleasant topics, and allowing titillating but not dangerous exploits.

Let me return to 1889 Britain, and the then-current events—which may well have led many readers to seek escapism. Here are a few items:

Underground trains in London (after an earlier start) expanded c. 1890; these were tubes, not laid by digging up roads
Organised football: by the late 1880s national agreements were coming
Jews flooded into London's east end: better shipping, London docks, no passports, and Jewish parasitism combined.
In 1888 were the 'Whitechapel Murders'—foreshadowing today, where murders of whites are ignored by the media. There's nothing of this in Jerome, though there is a drowned single mother story. The 'Aliens Act' was 1905.
Issues over jobs: 1888, women and 'phossy jaw'; 1889, gas workers; dockers' strike. 1889 union membership increased; but whether the members got much out of it must be doubtful.

The Thames (note for Americans: pronounced 'Tems') is tidal in the centre of London, and this is why the easterly stretches are far wider than the source, near Oxford, would suggest possible. Westminster and Hyde Park, the City of London and London Bridge, and east to Whitechapel, Stepney, Rotherhithe docks, Deptford, Greenwich, Woolwich and further to the sea—flanked by many rural-sounding placenames—are redolent of the tougher businesslike history of Britain.
From its source, the river, called the Isis, is much narrower, and very winding: roads prefer to be straight, so there's not much contact between roads and the Thames, apart from picturesque bridges. Britain was one of the first industrialised countries, but Jerome, writing his book in a Victorian summer, overlooking London, preferred to write of rural scenes and situations. I'd guess he used maps and guidebooks to fill out the detail.

Jerome opens his book with a long passage of rather absurd exaggeration about more-or-less imaginary illnesses (one is 'general disinclination to work') of the three men. These turn into the motive for their river jaunt. If you like that scene-setting, you'll probably like the rest of the book. At the finale, exeunt the three, muddy and dishevelled after several days of rain, going to the Alhambra, Leicester Square—mistaken for the 'contortionists from the Himalaya Mountains'.

The pace is slow: the first night scene, with the finger-nipping hoops supporting misbehaving canvas, is about half-way through the novel. Windsor, Runnymede, Magna Carta island, Maidenhead and Marlow, are some of the places visited or rowed past. Jerome omitted Eton, true to form, though his route must have passed close. Much of the scenery is still identifiable: the Barley Mow; the George and Dragon at Wargrave; Henley, Pangbourne, Sonning, Shepperton, Wallingford (from which the lock had been removed), Watlington ...

Chapter 11 includes a memorable three-age-or-so section 'specially inserted for schools' on Magna Charta (his spelling) and 'the cup of liberty', at an island at Runnymede in 1215. John (we are told) died a year later, having ravaged England, and then absolved by Pope Innocent. Jerome sounds something like Walter Scott; I don't know the sources he must have pored over, but a charter of liberties sounds good, and the deeper realities, such as Edward I's expulsion of Jews 75 years later, and Norman barons and resentful Saxons, are not part of Jerome's purpose; any more than they are now, in semi-official guidebooks and Pitkin glossy colour brochures.
A few other historical events appear in Jerome, reflecting published views of the time: Caesar and Cassivelaunus, approved for the operational students of the past who were not to know Belloc's secret they never suspected; Henry VIII having an energetic time courting Anne; and 'the Parliamentary struggle' as presented by the news sources of the time.

Dark and fearsome countryside provides frissons of terror: nights could be very dark and very lonely, and Jerome describes panic as one inn after another is found to be over-full. Allied to this are country churchyards with memorials (one including a few skulls), like.

But of course, as the Med provides the continuo for Ulysses, or steam trains the background for Close Encounter, the Thames naturally permeates the story, though mostly as background for amusing human activity. Jerome deploys just a few technical terms: none from sailing; boys 'rafting' with their plank structures; punts, naturally including an incident of a man on his pole; coracles; sculls; and an eight-oared racing outrigger.
J has an eye for status: a boat hired up river has an easier time going downstream, making it lower status; steam launches supposedly have lower priority than rowing boats; Maidenhead has 'dudes and ballet girls'; bargemen are 'sometimes rude to one another'.
Towing has several vignettes: snaking towropes, towing by girls, parasitic towing by other people and other vehicles, towpath (and other) crashes. And we have the hazards of drinking river water, and washing in it; the characters of lock keepers; angry swans; girls' clothes getting splashed by a hearty rowing man; and washerwomen before the days of electric washing machines.
Jerome even pleas for the simple life (but with cautions against sea trips and early morning dips) with a rowing-boat fable (admittedly, he followed it with an apology):

It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage.. Time to drink in life's sunshine—time to listen to the Aeolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us...

This is a world of small boys on street corners; small boys running errands—proof that telephones were not needed. And of houses and landladies; no doubt responsible to shadowy landowners. AND no debt: bank accounts were still rare; debts were the preserve of the aristocratic rich, or, as was soon to prove after the Great War, the once-rich: lenders prefer wealthy people.

Jerome's technique, which works well enough with opening tinned pineapple, packing for a journey, ruminating over barometers and weather forecasts, trying to sleep, penetrating smells, trying to cook stew, doing what's now called DIY, avoids some issues: could he, for example, make playing darts, or boiling an egg, or writing a novel, or playing scrabble (Kingsley Amis could do this) mildly amusing? His account of writing his own material might have been worth reading.
And there must be something to learn from the sets of objects J avoids, for example the upper classes, complicated and tiresome negotiations, and negotiations generally—he omits amusing accounts of shopping, for instance, and horse-trading. He has nothing on pagan aspects of the world, though he knows about the Sandwich Islands: what was Martinmas, or All Hallows Eve, for example? He has nothing on improving lectures for the lower orders.

Music: we have a menu of songs: the Soldier's Chorus from Faust, whatever that is; a music hall song, He's Got 'Em On, which doesn't seem to have survived except as sheet music; Gilbert and Sullivan, as already mentioned; a tragic German Liede; Two Lovely Black Eyes; a banjo—perhaps the inspiration for Bateman's Guest Who Brought a Banjo?—and bagpipe. Jerome did not attempt the piano as a comic subject.

Food: we have another menu. Beefsteak pie, gooseberry tarts, leg of mutton, bacon, eggs, bread, butter, jam. Lime juice, lemonade. Canned pineapple; I'd guess cans were expensive and for luxuries. Cheesemongers were specialists. Fast food was chop houses: we are pre-fish and chips, and pre-burgers—perhaps they needed powerful mincers to disguise their contents? Only one of them knew what 'scrambled eggs' were.
We also have 'bitter beer' which I suspect kept well, in days before refrigeration. And we have long clay pipes, made of kaolin, before cigarettes: white, cool, with loose tobacco; but fragile.

Anyway; more jokes, anecdotes, narratives, unions against others as in 'Jews' laughing at 'goyim'. And what might be called 'craic'.

Now, the shrewd reader will know that Jerome was not exactly a one hit wonder: he established a magazine, wrote another book (1900) Three men on the Bummel, and had a successful play, made into a film, The Passing of the Third Floor Back—concerning renting of rooms in a house.

Three Men on the Bummel is mostly set in Germany; for some reason—Brummagem? Brummy?—I'd thought this book dealt with a Birmingham canal holiday; in fact it's a bicycle trip, with two of the men on a tandem I think, to Germany before the First World War; hence a whole collection of views, or perhaps stereotypes, can emerge, undoubtedly stiffened by guidebooks.
A 'bummel' is an electric tramcar, for example in Dresden. Some of these trams have long ago vanished in Britain: Bacup was one of the first British places to have them, something you'd never guess, now.

Jerome seems to have been co-opted into the anti-German lead-in to the 'Great War'; the last chapter of Three Men on the Bummel seem to have been inserted as part of this process. I'll just note a few things here.

Note on sightseers and historians: '.. Gibbon had to trust to travellers' tales for a description of the Hellespont, and the Rhine was chiefly familiar to English students through.. Caesar's Commentaries .. Dr Johnson, familiar with little else than the view down Fleet Street, could read the description of a Yorkshire moor with pleasure and profit. To a cockney etc. But we, or rather the steam-engine and the camera for us, have changed all that. ... An American friend .. told me that he had obtained a more correct and satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth put together. .. class.. for English literature. .. lengthy, but otherwise unobjectionable, poem. ...'

German dialects. Remember Germany was only recently unified. 'Hanover.. to learn the best German. The disadvantage is that outside Hanover, which is only a small province, nobody understands this best German. .. Germany being separated so many centuries unto a dozen principalities, is unfortunate in possessing a variety of dialects. Germans from Posen wishful to converse with men of Wurtemburg, have to talk as often as not in French or English; and young ladies who have received an expensive education in Westphalia.. [can't] understand a word said to them in Mechlenburg. An English-speaking foreigner, it is true, would find himself equally nonplussed among the Yorkshire wolds, or the purlieus of Whitechapel; but.. Throughout Germany it is not only in the country districts and among the uneducated that dialects are maintained. Every province has practically its own language.. An educated Bavarian.. will continue to speak South German..'

On 'The pen of my aunt': The explanation is that, in nine cases out of ten, he has learnt French from "Ahn's First-Course." The history of this famous work is remarkable and instructive. .. originally written as a joke by a witty Frenchman..' [I have no idea how true this is!]

Dresden 'perhaps the most attractive town in Germany'. Dresden's August the Strong, Carlyle's "the Man of Sin".

Prague: 'Seat of the Reformation' Thirty Years' War and "Fenstersturz", John Huss, St Jerome, Tycho Brahe, Ziska, Wallenstein, palace in the Waldstein-Platz, Sigismund, Tarborites, Maximilian, Gustavus Adolphus, Jews of Prague Ghetto.

Pilsener beer and Apollinaris water. Prague, Carlsbad, Nuremburg. Then Jerome on officials: the final chapter, which may have been tacked on as propagandist appendix, lists many failings and disagreeable aspects of Germans, too dull to repeat here. With other evidence I'd suggest Jerome was part of the post-1900 anti-German drumbeat in Britain, added to the century-or-so old anti-Russian rumblings. Later, his play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, a lodging-house story, was turned into a depressing and moody black-and-white 1930s film (watchable on Internet). It would be nice to think JKJ was a naïve actor/artist; the reality seems to be he turned into yet another hireling, possibly another crypto-Jew, a literary Charlie Chaplin, George being George Wingrave, and Harris Carl Hentschel. He may have ended his life as yet another fairly wealthy man with little in his head. How true this is, I have not attempted to discover.