Introduction

‘I did not intend to write a funny book, at first,’¹ Jerome K. Jerome wrote of the novel by which he is best remembered – further evidence, if such were needed, that books once embarked upon acquire a life of their own, and that famous books, like famous rivers, may well have obscure or modest origins. Just turned thirty in 1889, and beginning to make his mark as an essayist and playwright, Jerome had recently returned from his honeymoon, and was living in a top-floor flat on Chelsea Embankment, the circular drawing-room of which afforded views up and down the Thames and across to Battersea Park, and the Surrey Hills beyond. Boating on the Thames had become a popular pastime in recent years, and publishers did brisk business with guidebooks-cum-histories of the river, in which topographical details were interwoven with easily digested snippets of English history; inspired by the outlook, perhaps, Jerome planned to write just such a book, the facts and figures of which would be lightened by occasional flurries of ‘humorous relief’. He decided to write these first, drawing on his own experiences of boating on the river with his friends George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, but before long the anecdotes had elbowed aside the sober slabs of history and topography, and were threatening to take over altogether. The editor of Home Chimes, where Jerome’s work was being serialized, had no time for the factual passages, and hurled most of them overboard; and when, the following year, Three Men in a Boat was published in book form, little remained of the author’s original intentions. Though cold-shouldered by the critics, the book was an instant success, making Jerome a household name and casting a long shadow over his attempts, in later life, to establish himself as a serious, even portentous, writer; and the misadventures of George, Harris, J. the narrator and the dog Montmorency remain one of the best-loved books in the language, endlessly reprinted, and filmed three times.

Some ten years later, Jerome resurrected George, Harris and J. and sent them on a bicycling tour of Germany, the results of which were published as Three Men on the Bummel – a ‘bummel’ being defined, in the last paragraph of the book, as a ‘journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started’.² As an account of Jerome’s rambling, conversational technique, this could hardly be bettered; and, quite apart from their entertainment value, both novels are wonderfully redolent of the late-Victorian and Edwardian England of Mr Pooter, the ground-down hero of the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody,³ and W. S. Gilbert’s ‘The Bab Ballads’⁴ and the early novels of H. G. Wells and P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City,⁵ of jocular clerks on the spree in plus-fours and fluorescent blazers, and men with heavy handlebar moustaches and mild suburban voices thoughtfully refilling their pipes before embarking on another yarn from the depths of a leather armchair.

‘I did not know I was a humorist,’ Jerome went on to admit – nor, indeed, had the first twenty-odd years of his life provided many occasions for mirth. His father, Jerome Clapp Jerome, was born in 1807, educated at Merchant’s Taylors School, and trained as an architect. Of ‘Puritan stock’, he soon displayed a passion for preaching, honing his technique at the Rothwell Nonconformist Academy in Northamptonshire; though never ordained, he spent a good deal of time preaching in Congregationalist chapels, several of which he also designed. In 1838 he married the daughter of a Swansea solicitor. She had been left some money, so they moved to Appledore in Devon, where Mr Clapp – as he was known to his congregation – bought a farm and preached in the local chapel, publishing a hymn book for its special use. Misled into believing that silver could be mined on his land, he spent part of his wife’s inheritance on vain attempts to bring it to the surface.

In 1855 the Jeromes moved to Walsall, in the West Midlands, where fortunes were being made from coal. Mr Jerome became a partner in an iron works instead, as well as building and designing the town’s Congregational chapel. When he eventually decided to try his luck with coal, and sank two pits on Cannock Chase, his efforts were thwarted by sand and underground streams; only after he had sold out did the ‘Jerome Pits’ come good, but by then his wife’s money had disappeared. Reduced to penury, they moved to Poplar, in the East End of London, where Mr Jerome tried, without success, to set up shop as an ironmonger. Despite the shortage of funds, Mrs Jerome worked hard to keep up appearances, employing a maid, just as the Pooters did, insisting that her two daughters wore gloves in public, and Mr Jerome his silk hat, and keeping her own lace and silk dresses for best. Young Jerome remembered that their house was the biggest in the street, replete with ‘china and fine pictures and a semi-grand piano by Collard & Collard, and damask curtains in the windows’. It was, no doubt, a very English kind of ‘shabby gentility’.

The fourth child of the marriage, Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall in 1859: the ‘K’ stood for Klapka, the surname of an improbable-sounding 28-year-old Hungarian general who had lodged with the family while writing his memoirs. Jerome’s siblings were christened Milton Melanchton, Paulina and Blandina, and to distinguish him from his father he was referred to as ‘Luther’. This seemed apposite enough since, like many young Victorians, he was brought up on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,⁶ in which the roastings and disembowellings endured by heroic Protestant clergymen at the hands of Queen Mary and her diabolical Catholic henchmen were itemized in gruesome detail. Terrified by visions of Hell and Damnation, he came to regard organized religion with grave suspicion, and God Himself with a certain wariness.

Equally alarming was the East End itself. Populated, in part, by impoverished Russian and Polish Jews who had fled from tsarist pogroms, the haunt of Jack the Ripper and – according to Sherlock Holmes – dastardly Lascars and unreliable Chinese, the interminable terraces that stretched east for mile after mile from the City of London occupied, until the 1950s at least, a place in popular mythology similar to that now claimed by the most terrifying and rundown stretches of New York. ‘There is a menace, a haunting terror, that is to be found nowhere else,’ Jerome recalled. ‘The awful silence of its weary streets. The ashen faces, with their lifeless eyes that rise out of the shadows and are lost. It was these surroundings in which I passed my childhood that gave me, I suppose, my melancholy, brooding disposition.’ Although Jerome liked to think that he mixed with ‘a bad set, which included the Wesleyan minister’s two sons, also the only child of the church organist’, he was persecuted by the local urchins, who let out a great cry when they saw him coming. ‘It was not so much the blows as the jeers and taunts I fled from, spurted by mad terror,’ he remembered in My Life and Times: ‘My mother explained to me that it was because I was a gentleman.’ Looking back on his childhood in his autobiographical novel, Paul Kelver, Jerome recalled ‘hurrying through noisy, crowded thoroughfares, where flaring naptha lamps illumine fierce, patient, leadencoloured faces; through dim-lit empty streets, where monstrous shadows come and go upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow, noisesome streets, where the gutters swarm with children, and each ever-open doorway vomits riot…’ It was a world far more akin to such grim masterpieces of late-Victorian and Edwardian social realism as Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago⁷ and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists⁸ than to the benign escapism of Three Men in a Boat: it may help to explain why, though never committed to any political movement or party, Jerome instinctively sided with the underdog, and always remained uneasily aware of how thin a line separates civilized behaviour from brutality and degradation. The dead dog and the dead woman whom the three happy oarsmen encounter floating down the river shock us with their apparent incongruity, and remind us that Jerome’s view of the universe was nothing like as carefree or as cheerful as his novels might have us think.

A beneficiary of W. E. Forster’s 1870 Education Act, as a result of which some form of primary education was made available to all children for the first time, Jerome attended the Philological School in Lisson Grove, later upgraded to Marylebone Grammar School. During school holidays he visited the surrounding countryside, and years later he remembered the corn fields round Swiss Cottage, a stag hunt in Highgate, and cattle grazing in Walthamstow. For all the horrors of the East End, ‘London was a cosier place to dwell in, when I was a young man. For one thing, it was less crowded. Life was not one everlasting scrimmage.’

Jerome was twelve when his father died, revealing on his death-bed that his thick, black pelt of hair was a wig. The family moved to Finchley, and two years later Jerome left school and became the sole bread-winner. Like many others at the time, he got a job as a clerk: the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw a phenomenal rise in the number of clerks employed in offices, most of them poor, undereducated and overworked, and he took a clerical job with the London and North-Western Railway at Euston, earning ten shillings a week. The following year his mother died, and – with his brother dead, one sister married, and the other a governess in the north of England – Jerome was alone in the world. He moved into a series of digs, in one of which a fellow lodger had hanged himself.

Even at this early age, Jerome longed to be a writer, and in Paul Kelver he describes how, as a boy, he once met Dickens – or someone he assumed to be Dickens – wandering about in Hackney. ‘No man ever made money or fame but by writing his very best,’ the Dickens figure tells him. ‘If you write books thinking only of money you will be disappointed. It is easier earned in other ways.’ Young Kelver forgets to ask Dickens his name. ‘That makes me think of your future with hope,’ the novelist tells him, no doubt recognizing a kindred spirit. ‘You are an egotist, Paul; and that is the beginning of all art.’ Since Dickens died in 1870, Jerome must have been very young when and if this meeting occurred: he referred to it again in his autobiography, where the great man lets fly with ‘Oh, damn Mr Pickwick!’

When not consorting with important novelists, Jerome set out to master the worldly vices, among them smoking, drinking and girls: ‘baccy’ was to prove a lifetime’s enthusiasm, but where women were concerned, ‘To be on a footing of familiarity with a barmaid was the height of most young clerks’ ambition.’ To add variety to his life, and give himself something to write about, he involved himself with the theatre in his spare time – not something that would have pleased his Low Church parents, who regarded the theatre and its dependents with grave suspicion. He joined a repertory company, producing playbills, doing the advertising, stage-managing, and, in due course, appearing on stage himself. Eventually he gave up his job on the railways to spend nearly three years travelling round England with a touring company, leading the kind of life enjoyed by the Crummles family in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby nearly half a century earlier. It was, he wrote, a ‘jungle sort of existence’: crooked managers made off with their wages, they slept in dressing-rooms or church porches, and he ‘played every 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-like⁹ 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 is why 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 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 Newnes¹¹ 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’s¹³ 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 Pollys¹⁴ 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 – especially the 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 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 Connolly in 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 intercepted by 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, but the fortunate few built themselves villas and bungalows in hitherto remote or secluded spots along its banks. The famous regattas, like those at Henley and Marlow, in which oarsmen from Oxford, Cambridge, London and elsewhere competed for heavy silver trophies, were already in existence, but from the 1870s the Thames acquired a new life and character as a source of pleasure and recreation. ‘In its recreative character it is absolutely unique. I know of no other classic stream that is so splashed about for the mere fun of it,’ Henry James observed in English Hours. On the slightest pretext, he went on, ‘the mighty population takes to the boats. They bump each other in the narrow, charming channel, between Oxford and Richmond they make an uninterrupted procession… If the river is the busiest suburb of London it is also by far the prettiest.’ Rowing-boats, sailing boats, punts, steam-launches and even the occasional gondola jostled for place in the locks: at the height of the Season, and especially in Ascot Week, up to 800 boats per day passed through Boulter’s Lock near Maidenhead, their occupants togged out in the height of fashion. By 1895 some 400 steam-launches were operating on the river; they were resented by oarsmen and fishermen for the noise they made, for the clouds of black smoke belching from their funnels and for the wash they set up, and their owners were widely regarded as pompous, self-important, overweight and overfond of the bottle.

Understandably enough, those who lived along the river did all they could to benefit from the boom. Firms like Salter Brothers in Oxford sold or hired out boats; riverside pubs and hotels did brisk business; office workers who couldn’t afford a hotel or felt that a breath of fresh air would do them good, and chose instead to camp out, on land or in their boats, could buy or hire tents, hampers, bedding and the like. An Edwardian enthusiast described how shops like that visited by George, Harris J. and Montmorency (p. 114) were ‘stocked with the first object of supplying boat-parties and campers with the necessaries of life’. Among these, tinned food played an important part, so much so that ‘the shop-windows are almost completely furnished with supplies of tinned everything, festering in the sun’. Observant as ever, John Carey has noted how tinned food came to be symptomatic of the debasement of the masses ‘because it offends against what the intellectual designates as nature: it is mechanical and soulless’. T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene and John Betjeman all wrote about tinned food with a furious disdain; Jerome, on the other hand, found it ‘genial and amusing’, and one of the most famous set pieces in the book revolves about an unopened and unopenable tin of pineapple chunks.

Unrepentant consumers of tinned foods, George, Harris and J. set out in search of mild adventure, very much in the spirit of Mr Pickwick and his young friends much earlier in the century. Like The Pickwick Papers, Three Men in a Boat is an innocent, inconsequential idyll, crammed with digressions and irrelevancies and authorial asides and all the other garrulous pleasantries of the picaresque novel, honed down for a more impatient generation of readers. V. S. Pritchett¹⁷ – one of the very few critics to have written about Three Men in a Boat – sees Jerome as belonging, with the Grossmith brothers and his close friend W. W. Jacobs,¹⁸ to a ‘small, secure Arcadia where the comic disasters of life are the neater for being low’, and his humour as ‘a response of the emerging lower middle class to the inconvenience of their situation’. Well meant as this is – Pritchett himself came from a not dissimilar background to Jerome, and writes as an admirer – it doesn’t quite ring true. Jerome’s Thames is, for the most part, a good deal more Arcadian than ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, the Pooters’ terraced house in Holloway, replete as it is with half-witted maids, irreverent errand boys, gossiping neighbours and all those other hazards that affect those who are anxious to impress but seldom succeed, and the Three Men seem far less embattled and altogether more sure of their place in the world than poor, pompous Mr Pooter, brow-beaten at work and fussily incompetent on the domestic front. Both books, Pritchett suggests, exploit ‘that understatement which runs like a rheumatism through English humour’, which may be true enough; but whereas The Diary of a Nobody is classic English social comedy, making much of class differences and the sad absurdities of social pretensions, Three Men in a Boat is brisker and far less agonized, and reads at times like so many ‘Idle Thoughts’ held together with dabs of narrative glue.

Though J. is, appropriately, a journalist, the Three Men are – like Mr Pooter’s disrespectful son, Lupin – direct descendants of the perkier kind of Dickensian clerk. They live in digs with kindly but overbearing landladies; ground down at work, they prove boisterous and defiant when unleashed on the wider world. Their longing to be ‘free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life’ has a familiar ring to it. ‘At Cookham,’ Pritchett sardonically observes, ‘these suburbans will imagine themselves in the “wild heart of nature” ’, and, like many city-dwellers, they tend to romanticize and idealize country living and country folk, at least until the weather breaks. And, like most oppressed office workers, they console themselves with home-spun homilies about the vanity and transience of earthly fame and riches. ‘Throw the lumber over, man!’ the narrator urges his readers. ‘Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink…’ They dislike the snobs who live in Maidenhead – many of them weekenders, travelling down from Paddington on the Great Western Railway – and snooty, exclusive ‘riparian proprietors’ who try to keep out the ‘hoi-polloi’ with white-painted posts and chains and ‘No Trespassing’ signs: the proprietors, for their part, no doubt detested these urban intruders who wandered on to their land and chopped up their trees for firewood, but their point of view remains unaired. ‘Bally’ counts as strong language, and when things go wrong, as they always do, those responsible are denounced as ‘You cuckoo!’ or ‘You dunder-headed idiots!’ George plays the banjo, badly (‘They are all the rage this season,’ he explains); much pleasure is had from joshing, facetious word-play of the kind that riled the thinking classes, so that when Harris treads on George’s corns, George – mellowed by supper and a pipe and a noggin of whisky – merely murmurs ‘Steady, old man, ’ware wheat!’ A good deal is made of familiar problems like packing and oversleeping and unreliable weather-forecasters; as is to be expected of men on their own, they make heavy weather of sleeping arrangements, tread or sit down on astonishingly resilient pats of butter, and brew up repellent Irish stews into which every known ingredient is hurled.

As they nudge their way upstream from Kingston-on-Thames to Oxford, we’re treated to a series of reminiscences and digressions, triggered off by happenings along the way, and suitably conversational in tone. J.’s pompous Uncle Podger is recalled trying to hang a picture, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake; the unavailability of hotel bedrooms in the Windsor and Datchet area is remembered in harrowing detail; in Wallingford they’re subjected to a cascade of fishermen’s tall stories, each more bogus than the last. Jerome makes much of the malice and vindictiveness of inanimate objects, with tow-lines, metal hoops and the tin of pineapple chunks doing their worst to frustrate his heroes. And he makes effective use of bathos, embarking on long and heartfelt passages of lush, Pre-Raphaelite prose, only to have them cut short by one of Harris’s commonplace observations, or by the oarsmen ramming into a punt on which three elderly gentlemen are peacefully fishing the evening away. Harris’s doomed attempts to sing extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan before an audience of old ladies provides the book with its comic climacteric, but overall a sublime contentment reigns: ‘We lit our pipes, and sat, looking out on the quiet night, and talked.’

Jerome’s new publisher, Arrowsmith – whose other bestsellers included The Diary of a Nobody and Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda – was very taken with Three Men in a Boat: he told its author that it ‘ought to do well in the holiday months’, and suggested cutting up some of the longer passages in case they alarmed potential readers. The book’s success on both sides of the Atlantic made Jerome’s a name to conjure with, and when the proprietor of a new monthly magazine decided to pick a popular name as its editor, he chose Jerome in preference to Kipling. The first issue of The Idler appeared in February 1892, and included contributions from Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Although he sometimes put in sixteen hours a day on the magazine, scrupulously sifting through the ‘slush pile’ in search of new authors – W. W. Jacobs among them – Jerome still maintained the pose of idleness, contributing a regular column called ‘The Idlers’ Club’ and holding regular ‘Idler at Homes’ in Arundel Street off the Strand, attended by cronies like H. G. Wells, Barrie and Conan Doyle. A year later he added to his load by taking on the editorship of a weekly magazine, Today, serializing Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Ebb Tide’ and publishing work by Hardy, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope and even Aubrey Beardsley. He was a popular and convivial figure at the Fleet Street end of the London literary spectrum; overworked as he was, he still found time for bluff, all-male gatherings of writers, politicians and theatrical folk, preferring informal and often short-lived dining-clubs like the Vagabonds or the Omar Khayyam to grander, more snobbish West End clubs.

Jerome’s career as an editor came to an end in 1897, when he was sued for libel over some footling matter by a Leeds company promoter. The plaintiff was awarded a farthing in damages, but both sides were ordered to pay their own costs. The Idler and Today closed down, and Jerome – who had recently become a father – was once again a freelance writer. Although he was to return to London after World War I, he decided to move to the country, and bought a house on the Thames, at Wallingford in Oxfordshire.

Although he received no royalties from the pirated American edition, earnings from Three Men in a Boat and his other books and plays were enough to keep the family afloat. Before long, Jerome decided to send the Three Men on their adventures again. Not surprisingly, George, Harris and J. have become stouter and more settled in the ten years since they took to the river: in Pritchett’s opinion, ‘they have lost the happy, impartial rudeness of unattached young men’. George weighs over twelve stone, has risen (like his original) to the rank of bank manager, and is still a bachelor. Harris and J. are respectable family men, with several children apiece and such trappings of worldly success as paddocks and cucumber frames. J. is making his way as a writer, and is bruised by snobbish and dismissive critics (‘You’ve been reading those criticisms again,’ Mrs J. tells him). Both Harris and J. enjoy playing the parts of henpecked husbands, and both are – by modern standards – unrepentantly old-fashioned in their views on marriage (‘In married life,’ J. explains to George, ‘the man proposes, the wife submits. It is her duty; all religion teaches it’). Defiant behind their wives’ backs, they long to get away with their men friends, but don’t quite know how to broach the matter; when Mrs J. announces that she too would like some time to herself, J. feels quite bruised and affronted. Domestic diplomacy behind them at last, they decide to make a bicycling tour of Germany; and much of the fascination of their ensuing adventures lies in Jerome’s perceptive, and disconcertingly prophetic, view of the Wilhelmine Germans as a people in whom kindliness and a passion for order are combined with passivity, a taste for brutality and authoritarian rule.

Three Men on the Bummel was published in 1900, and that same year Jerome took his family to live in Dresden. Its charms, he declared, were ‘more solidly German, and more lasting’ than those of Paris – yet another manifestation of the prevailing notion, inflamed by the Romantics and by philosophers like Nietszche and Herder, that German culture was somehow more profound and more rooted than the articulate but superficial Latin varieties. Jerome’s admiration for his hosts was reciprocated: a club was formed in his honour, and his new book became a set text in German schools.

Back in England, Jerome was at last taken seriously by the critics when Paul Kelver was published in 1902. The Times Literary Supplement compared it, favourably, with Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and suggested that although Three Men in a Boat had been the literary equivalent of a millstone round its author’s neck, his new novel displayed ‘shrewd observations of a certain habit of mind and cast of character’. He visited St Petersburg, skied in Switzerland with Conan Doyle, and, in 1908, made his first lecture tour of America, visiting every state of the union and calling on the President, Theodore Roosevelt, who – or so it was claimed – happened to be reading one of his books at the time.

Jerome enjoyed public speaking, and was not afraid of making his views known, in person and in print. While editing TodayMy Life and Times