Three Men in a Boat

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Book: Three Men in a Boat Read Free
Author: Jerome K. Jerome
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afford, and at the same time undercut sober, old-fashioned rivals. New magazines and periodicals proliferated, many of them – like
Tit-Bits, Answers
and
Comic Cuts
– responding to the concerns of the newly literate classes with hints on etiquette, bicycling columns and snippets of self-improvement. Nor was literary fare neglected. Although
Tit-Bits
– which George Newnes 11 founded in 1881 – rejected work by Conrad and Virginia Woolf, it made a point of reprinting excerpts from classic authors; John Carey subversively suggests that ‘As a means of awakening interest in books, arousing curiosity and introducing its readers to new ideas,
Tit-Bits
must compare very favourably with more acclaimed organs such as T. S. Eliot’s
Criterion
and F. R. Leavis’s
Scrutiny
, and its effects were infinitely more widespread.’ Some of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in
Tit-Bits
, as well as in the
Strand Magazine
, and although the serialization of novels was a well-established Victorian tradition, the novel itself was not immune to the challenges presented by new markets and new readers. The bulky and expensive three-decker novel, beloved of the great Victorians and of Mudie’s Lending Library, 12 gave way, in part, to shorter, more accessible works; the middlebrow bestseller became a staple of the publishing business, selling in huge quantities to homebound commuters from W. H. Smith’s 13 railway bookstalls. Jerome was typical of this new mass readership, and in due course
Three Men in a Boat
, itself a bestseller, would be denounced by the literary establishment for its ‘vulgarity’ and for the ‘colloquial clerks’ English’ in which it was written. But, as Carey points out, ‘Jerome was consciously wooing a new readership: the perky clerks and shop assistants, the Mr Pollys 14 and Lupin Pooters, 15 whose stripy blazers and half-starved features still gaze triumphantly from a thousand photographs,’ and although ‘the genteel highbrows of the next generation – Forster, Virginia Woolf, Eliot – were to sneer at this whole breed, clerks were Jerome’s class, and he liked them – especiallythe jaunty, stoical way they took life’s knocks’. When, early in the next century, the right-wing poet T. W. H. Crosland savaged the clerking classes and all they stood for in his polemic
The Suburbans
, he noted that Wells, Shaw and Jerome, all of whom had worked as clerks, were the favourite authors of those he most despised.
    But before any of this could take place, Jerome had to find his way into print. It proved a long, dispiriting business, with evenings given over to writing after a tiring day in a solicitor’s office, and the amassing of a hefty wodge of rejection letters. In the end
The Lamp
accepted a story, and the author of another magazine handed a dazed Jerome five pounds in exchange for something he had written. Persistence had paid off at last, and before long Jerome was writing ‘Idle Thoughts’ for F. W. Robinson’s
Home Chimes
, fellow-contributors to which included Mark Twain, Algernon Charles Swinburne and J. M. Barrie, 16 who was soon to become a close friend. (An affectation of idleness was to become one of Jerome’s
leitmotifs
: as V. S. Pritchett remarked, hard-working and browbeaten clerks – all of whom, like George, worked on Saturdays until lunchtime, as well as long hours during the week – liked to pose as men of leisure and to ‘regard idleness as a joke’, 17 and J. tells us that he and his fellow-oarsmen all affect a ‘general disinclination to work of any kind’.)
    Published in 1885, Jerome’s first book,
On the Stage – and Off
, drew on his theatrical experiences. It was followed a year later by
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
, in which he established a recognizable and distinctive tone of voice: colloquial, discursive, both fanciful and commonsensical. Dedicated, at some length, to his pipe, it consisted of ruminative, mildly humorous essays on

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