Book Review: Three Men in a Boat

Title: Three Men in a Boat

Author: Jerome K. Jerome

Date: 1889, 1957

Publisher: Penguin (1957)

ISBN: none

Length: 185 pages

Quote: “George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood—especially George, who weighs about twelve stone. Other works may excel this in depth of thought...but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it.”

Was that one of the jokes? Who can say? This is a plausible story of three Victorian English gentlemen, and a dog, on vacation in a rowboat.

Jerome K. Jerome was another of those English humorists whose jokes are accessible to American readers. By current standards his jokes may be on the long and indirect side. He spends a page or two describing a scene in the favorite clichés of Romanticist novels and essays, the river singing the little song it’s sung so many thousand years and our thoughts half sad, half sweet, and so on, and then throws in a chunk of “incurable veracity”: “Harris said: ‘How about when it rained?’”

If you want to laugh out loud, Jerome will help. If you don’t...this may not be an ideal book for reading in school.

Many funny things were written in the nineteenth century, although too many comic writers felt a need to make it clear that they were joking by writing in tedious “dialect,” which could not ever have been much fun to read. Why has Three Men in a Rowboat worn so much better than Artemus Ward (I made a samizdat copy of his collected works, with standard spelling, and it’s still pretty funny) or Orpheus C. Kerr (a satire, superficially in favor of expanding government, in the voice of a fictive office seeker) or the other books and writers sampled in Mark Twain’s Library of Humor? Possibly because Jerome’s thought was ahead of his time. Several passages, though written in Victorian English words, sound like something you might read or watch on television today.

“The first list we made out had to be discarded...the upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things...George said... ‘We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things we can’t do without.’...with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up that boat...with a store of foolish things which they think essential...but which are really only useless lumber. How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with...expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation...It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard.”

“I...told them that they had better leave the whole matter entirely to me. They fell into the suggestion with a readiness that had something uncanny about it; George put on  a pipe...and Harris...lit a cigar. This was hardly what I intended. What I had meant, of course, was that I should boss the job, and that Harris and George should potter about under my directions.”

“That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings...I do not admire it myself...even my landlady herself...excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up...with its tail broken...and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round and admire it...and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.”

And so on. And the message of the story...readers probably wouldn’t have said it has one, if Jerome hadn’t said in his introduction that it has...the message of Three Men in a Boat was a sort of introduction to a large part of the advertising we see now.

The three men and dog spend ten fine long summer days on the Thames and are then glad to go back to their jobs, just like yuppies today. The concept of a summer vacation was new in the nineteenth century. Schools closed in summer, and all right-minded students undoubtedly looked forward to the long summer break between terms, but parents and teachers had agreed to schedule this break so that students could help harvest crops. Traditionally everyone old enough to work had been expected to work at least ten hours a day, six days a week, and give thanks that in Europe and North America employers were expected to concede either Sundays or Saturdays as days of rest. (In Muslim countries only Friday morning was so reserved; after services at the mosque, people had to go back to work.) 

The Industrial Age offered the ideal of equalizing at least the proportions of labor and leisure time among rich and poor people. Jerome’s generation fretted about the impending “problem of leisure”: if the working class had to work only eight hours a day, apparently they would need to be “educated” to use all that free time on something other than getting drunk, oversleeping, and having too many children. The idea of vacation travel was developed to address the urban middle class’s growing awareness that living in crowded cities was bad for their health. Hence the opening scene, in Three Men in a Boat, where the three men (who identify as “young” and are obviously healthy) complain of feeling “bad,” “run down,” and having all the symptoms mentioned in an ad for over-the-counter medicine. People who had been taught that “Wilful Waste Makes Woeful Want” weren’t likely to get into “vacationing” until they’d been convinced that they needed a change of pace, for their health.

The message? “Be a good writer, and eventually someone will pay you to take a vacation trip and write about it.”