The unsinkable Jerome K. Jerome

First published on my own little website in 1999, after I had learned that many of my well-read acquaintances had never read one of the masterpieces of English literature.

Jerome K. Jerome was born in Staffordshire in 1859, grew up in London, and left grammar school at 14. As a youth and young man he worked as a railway clerk, an actor, a freelance journalist, a private secretary, a purchasing agent, a parliamentary agent, and a solicitor's clerk. In 1889, when Three Men in a Boat was published, he had only recently become successful as a journalist and author.

Three Men in a Boat is an account of a boating trip on the Thames undertaken by three male friends – Jerome, Harris, and George – and a fox terrier, Montmorency. It features several expertly written comic setpieces (for example, an account of trying to open a tin of pineapple when one has forgotten to bring the can opener but really wants to eat some pineapple) and several expertly written meditations, ranging from the mystical to the informative and solemn, on life and history. Jerome's style is masterful, and he uses it to create a strong sense of good humour, benevolence, and well-being.

Three Men in a Boat is commonly regarded as a comic masterpiece, which is true as far as it goes. The book is often comic, and it is a masterpiece, so therefore it is a comic masterpiece. But Three Men in a Boat is more than that.

What struck me most about the book during my most recent re-reading of it was that it had the character of a post-modernist book, although it was written by a pre-modern. If Jerome's autobiography is to be believed, the literary establishment of his day certainly thought Three Men in a Boat was different from the usual run of books. According to him they execrated the book, castigating it as impertinent and vulgar – two accusations which seem bewilderingly unfounded in this the last year of an impertinent and vulgar century.

These charges probably arose from Jerome's treatment of events – the idle recreations of young men – which would have been beneath the notice of most serious writers of the day, and from his frank materialism. Here's an example of the materialism, which even today would probably offend many people:

How good one feels when one is full – how satisfied with oneself and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal – so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.

Then there was his comment about a poor single mother whose corpse the three friends pull from the river, and whose story they later learn: "Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly." Suicide was of course considered in those days to be a result of grave moral weakness, and attempting it was a crime. Blaming it only on lack of money and, as Jerome did, on the failure of the woman's family and friends to support her was probably far too lax morally for the professional protectors of public virtue who flourished in the Victorian era, as in ours.

Instead of being moral, as writers of his day tried to be, Jerome chose to be adult. He did not encourage the reader to pay homage to a severe moral code which was a poor approximation of the true values of society. Instead he wrote a book in which people have failings and other people forgive them because they realize that they, too, have failings. As he wrote of the suicide: "She had sinned – some of us do now and then." And, as we have seen, he argued that the world had failed the sinner, not that she had failed the world.

Three Men in a Boat was probably also considered vulgar and impertinent because of Jerome's use of a style which was much closer to conversation than most writing of the day. His writing is, though, the glory of the book. He writes with exceptional facility in many tones ranging from the broadly comic to the reverent.

The book is in fact primarily a virtuoso display of writing. Perhaps in their day Jerome's comic pieces were novel and refreshing, but over a century later many are all too familiar. Nevertheless, thanks to Jerome's accomplished handling of them, they remain highly entertaining.

Jerome also used his mastery of style to accomplish a goal which would be considered postmodern in a contemporary book. Three Men in a Boat is full of
engagingly written passages in which Jerome persuasively imputes deep significance to mundane events but eventually reveals that he is less than serious. These exercises demonstrate the limited validity of both fictional and non-fictional accounts of human undertakings.

Along the same line, in his introduction Jerome asserted that Three Men in a Boat was a work of "hopeless and incurable veracity," even though the reader quickly realizes that it is in fact at least in part a fabrication. Nevertheless, Jerome was not lying. The book is true.

It is true in that it is not propagandistic, as the literature of the day tended to be. Three Men in a Boat is an honest account of honest feelings which Jerome and his friends doubtless had, and of beliefs which they doubtless held. This honesty, expressed in elegant and limpid style, produced a book which a hundred and eleven years after its publication thrusts the reader into the lives of Jerome and his friends with an invigorating immediacy and verisimilitude which make the humour of the story richly entertaining. That is why people who read this little book tend to read it again and again.

The Unsinkable Jerome K. Jerome © 1999, John FitzGerald