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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