Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [11]
Jerome died of a stroke in 1927, not long after being given the freedom of Walsall. The ‘boat of life’ had run out to sea at last, and how better to leave him than with the concluding words of Three Men on the Bummel, redolent as they are of Jerome the companionable, pipe-smoking amateur philosopher? Our thoughts, he wrote, ‘are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ’tis over.’
Jeremy Lewis
Notes
1. Autobiographical quotations are from My Life and Times, published in 1926.
2. ‘Bummel’ is also German for a ‘stroll’. As befitted Jerome’s pose as an indolent man of leisure, a ‘Bummler’ is an ‘idler’ or a ‘loafer’.
3. Written by George Grossmith (1847–1912) and his brother Weedon (1854–1919), who also provided the illustrations, The Diary of a Nobody relatesthemisadventuresofaself-importantbutineffectualclerkwhoisdeferential in the office and regularly humiliated on the home front. Originally serialized in Punch, it was published in book form by Arrowsmith in 1892.
4. Comic verses written and illustrated by Jerome’s friend W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911): the first volume appeared in 1869, and a second followed four years later.
5. The supreme achievement of P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975); published in 1910, it is a masterly exposé of office life, and features the tyrannical bank manager Mr Bickersdyke.
6. John Foxe (1516–87) was a Protestant propagandist. His Book of Martyrs, published in 1563, left the English with an abiding suspicion of Roman Catholics and their ways.
7. Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) was a civil servant who wrote realistic novels about life in the East End slums. A Child of the Jago was published in 1896: his other novels include Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and The Hole in the Wall (1902).
8. Robert Tressell was the pen-name of Robert Noonan (c. 1870–1911), a Liverpudlian house-painter. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was published posthumously, in 1914: it is set in Hastings, but the scenes it describes would have been all too familiar to East End dwellers.
9. Like Jerome, George Gissing (1857–1903) had experience of life at its seamiest and most destitute: in New Grub Street he described the existence of impoverished hack-writers, eking out a livelihood in ways familiar to the youthful Jerome.
10. Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) was the prototypical Press baron. He founded what was to become the Amalgamated Press in 1887: he took over the Evening News in 1894, and among his journalistic creations were Answers (1888), the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903). In due course he became Lord Northcliffe.
11. George Newnes (1851–1910) was an influential and successful newspaper and magazine proprietor. He founded Tit-Bits (1881) and the Strand Magazine, where many of the Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in print.
12. Charles Mudie (1818–90) opened his Lending Library in Oxford Street in 1852. His name is forever associated with the long ‘three-decker’ novels beloved of the mid-Victorians; like W. H. Smith, he is believed to have exercised a degree of informal censorship via his disapproval of anything remotely risqué or immoral.
13. W. H. Smith (1825–91) opened his first railway bookstall on Euston Station in 1848: the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers in 1855 enabled him to sell cheap newspapers as well as books, and before long his shops were doing brisk business on railway stations up and down the country. Known as ‘Old Morality’, he shared Mudie’s views about the desirability of wholesome reading; but he encouraged publishers to abandon the three-decker novel in favour of single-volume works, which took up less shelf-space and could more easily be read on trains. Later in life he took