Three Men in a Boat Read Free Page B

unalarming, everyday subjects – ‘On Being Shy’, ‘On Being Hard-Up’, ‘Getting on in the World’, ‘Cats and Dogs’ – served up with rueful, rather resigned nuggets of worldly wisdom such as might have been accompanied, if spoken, by some sagacious knocking out or tamping of the pipe. It was a genre of
belles-lettres
that lay in a direct line of descent from the essays of Addison and Charles Lamb, flourished in Edwardian England, reached its nadir in
The Times
fourth leaders, and was mercilessly ridiculed by Cyril Connollyin
Enemies of Promise
.
Idle Thoughts
was dismissed by the critics, who derided Jerome as ’Arry K. ’Arry, and an example of the ‘new humorist’ at his worst. ‘The
Standard
spoke of me as a menace to English letters; the
Morning Post
as an example of the sad results to be expected of the over-education of the lower orders’ – but it sold over 20,000 copies in Britain, and did well in America too.
    Life was not all work, however, and in 1888 the ‘Idle Fellow’ married Georgina Stanley in St Luke’s Church, Chelsea. The child of an Irish mother and a Spanish father, she had a daughter from a previous marriage. Despite his unromantic suggestion that ‘Love is like the measles: we all have to go through it, and like the measles, we only take it once,’ Jerome seems to have been a devoted husband. And although she remained a shadowy figure in his masculine, pipe-smoking, club-loving world, she did persuade him to give up his job in the solicitor’s office to write full time. This included work for the theatre as well. Jerome was a keen theatre-goer, and in 1886 he interested the actor-manager Charles Hawtrey in his play,
Barbara
. Over the years Jerome was to enjoy some success as a playwright, above all with
The Passing of the Third Floor Back
, a portentous, quasi-religious fable featuring the Christ-like figure of the Stranger, which was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Adapted from one of his short stories, it had earlier lent its name to a collection of improving fables in which what started out as matter-of-fact, clubmanlike yarns took unexpected and usually unconvincing turns in the direction of fantasy and pious homily.
    Jerome’s best-known book could hardly have been more different. ‘Boating up and down the Thames had been my favourite sport ever since I could afford it,’ he tells us, adding that, in
Three Men in a Boat
, he ‘just put down the things that happened’ to the three friends while out on the river. Only Montmorency was pure invention. Carrying a hamper and ‘clad in fancy “blazers” ’, Jerome, Hentschel and Wingrave used to meet after work on Saturday afternoons and take the train from Waterloo to Richmond, a mile or two downstream from Teddington Lock, where the Thames ceases to be tidal, and the London river gives way to a slower-moving stream interceptedby locks and weirs. ‘At first,’ Jerome remembered, ‘we used to have the river to ourselves, but year by year it got more crowded, and Maidenhead became our starting-place.’
    During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Thames was a foul and putrid river: raw sewage was dicharged into it from the towns along its banks, and according to an ‘Oarsman’s Guide’ published in 1859, ‘odours that speak aloud stalk over the face of the so-called “waters”.’ By then, though, things were beginning to change. Two years earlier, the Thames Conservancy Board was established, and the death in 1861 of Prince Albert from typhoid caused by the filthy drains at Windsor Castle spurred on efforts to clean up the river; and the fact that almost all the commercial traffic had been transferred from slow-moving barges to the railways left the river free for the enjoyment of fishermen, scullers and those who simply wanted to spend an afternoon or a weekend messing about in a boat. Fast and frequent trains enabled Londoners to escape to the river; most were probably daytrippers,