Three Men in a Boat Read Free

part in
Hamlet
save Ophelia’.
    Back in London, Jerome lived rough for a while, moving on from one doss-house to another and enduring the same kind of poverty-stricken existence as his near-contemporary George Gissing. Still anxious to learn his trade as a writer, he bumped into an old friend who ‘had fallen on evil days, and had taken to journalism’. The friend suggested that he tried his luck as a Dickensian jobbing journalist, ‘penny-a-lining’ from all over London and covering fêtes, fires, court cases, coroners’ inquests, public meetings and even hangings (‘There was a coffee shop at the Old Bailey where, for half-a-crown, they let you climb on the roof’). When penny-a-lining lost its allure, he worked for a term as a schoolmaster, teaching swimming, gymnastics and deportment, before moving on to be the secretary to a builder, and then a commission agent. He lodged for a time near the British Museum, the haunt of penniless, Gissing-like 9 Grub Street hacks, and then shared a room off the Tottenham Court Road with a bank clerk called George Wingrave. Wingrave turned out to have a shrewd business sense, and in due course helped his friend in his dealings with editors and publishers; whether – like his namesake in
Three Men in a Boat
– he found it hard to get out of bed in the morning is not recorded.
    Another new friend from this period was Carl Hentschel, the ‘Harris’ of the novels. Polish by origin, Hentschel’s father had introduced photolithography to Britain. It was a process that helped to revolutionize the Press, making it far easier and quicker to reproduce illustrations in newspapers and magazines, since the slow and laborious business of hand-engraving the blocks from which they were printed could now be done by mechanical means. Its introduction enabled newspaper editors and their proprietors to include not just line drawings and photographs, but display advertisements of the kind that horrified the more fastidious type of reader, and it coincided with vast changes in the nature and accessibility of the printed word. Whereas books, newspapers and magazines had hitherto been, to a large extent, the preserve of the educated minority, they now braced themselves for the advent of that twentieth-century phenomenon, the mass market. Although the great majority of the population still left school at fourteen, Forster’s Education Act had created an immense new market of potential readers. ‘Never before had there been such reading masses,’ wrote H. G. Wells, while according to Bernard Shaw, ‘The Education Act was producing readers who had never before bought books, nor could have read them if they had.’ Many of these new readers were employed, like George or Mr Pooter, as clerks in banks, insurance offices, estate agents and the like; many of them lived in the new suburbs which – to the horror of the intelligentsia – were spreading out around London and the other great cities, addressed one another as ‘Old Man’, and employed a slang of their own, half-jocular and half-defiant. Uneasily aware of their lack of education, they were often eager to remedy matters through evening classes and the reading of classics in Everyman editions, and tended – if young, and of a radical persuasion – to bicycling, socialism and the wearing of knickerbockers. As Jerome would soon discover, they were looked down upon by writers and social commentators who had enjoyed the benefits of a university education, and regarded the upstart clerks and their spokesmen as bumptious philistines.
    As John Carey observed in
The Intellectuals and the Masses
, ‘the clerks were hardly equipped to appreciate “high” culture, which iswhy an alternative culture was created for them.’ Alfred Harmsworth, 10 the founder of the
Daily Mail
, took full advantage of the new technologies to cater to a mass readership, while his dependence on advertising enabled him to price his papers at levels even the hard-up could