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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