Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [7]
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