Why is Three Men in a Boat eternally readable? Nigel Williams explains why the book is a comic masterpiece.

Nigel Williams wrote the introduction to the Prion edition of Three Men in a Boat.

Some years ago I took a trip up the Thames (with two friends) in a double sculling skiff, that could have been the one Jerome used for the journey described in the pages that follow. It was built in 1886, three years before the publication of Jerome’s comic classic and was equipped with the same hoops and awning Jerome describes in Three Men in a Boat. There were many pleasurable things about the experience, but one of my favourites happened just as we were pulling up towards Boulter’s Lock on a beautiful summers evening - in the week of the Henley Regatta.

A guy working on a building site that backed on to the river leaned out from his scaffolding, took a look at three of us, noticed my dog sitting up in the prow of the boat and cupped his hands to his mouth. He was a large man of about forty, covered in tattoos and did not, I have to say, look the reading type. For a moment I thought he was going to comment on our physique (or lack of it) and then, to my surprise, he shouted - 'Don’t forget the tin opener!'

There can’t be many Edwardian books that evoke that kind of response. And Three Men in a Boat has remained, since its first publication, one of the great funny books of all times. Some find its jocular tone offensive, others are frankly bored by the odd passage of rapturous description - I myself always skip the bit about Runnymede - but it sets the tone for almost all great literary comedians who follow it - Wodehouse, for example, was a Jerome fan. The book’s great achievement is to take understatement, the great weapon of English (and Czech) humour, and use it to lay bare the curiously violent, undisciplined emotions that lie at the heart of English sang-froid. The opening section, for example on hypochondria, which builds and builds - all the time using the flat, throwaway accents that Jerome made uniquely his - works so well because behind it there is something vivid and real. And the celebrated incident of the tin-opener is funny not only because of the same relentless exaggeration, but because you can hear in the narrator’s voice that very English desperation that one is not supposed to show before friends or colleagues. Jerome writes, in the introduction: 'The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the knowledge it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. Its pages form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them and for that, no extra charge has been made.'

That is the joke at the heart of the book. In fact, Jerome’s comic method, as you might expect, depends on doing precisely the opposite - allowing the reader to observe the small hypocrisies and bluffs of the narrator in a manner that is at once broad and subtle – since he invites us to collaborate in criticising him while, at the same time, clearly trying to salvage that most important English commodity - his dignity.

George and Harris may be, as Jerome says, 'creatures of flesh and blood', but one of our pleasures in reading the text is watching the way in which our author knowingly nudges them into comic stereotypes. The whole thing has the feel of a smoking room story in which the actors in the narration are listening, chuckling in anticipation as their chosen fabulist rewrites events for their benefit. The addition of the dog for example (Montmorency is an entirely fictitious character and Jerome did not actually get a dog until long after he had finished with sculling on the Thames) is an example of a favourite ploy of the English humorist - an in-joke intended for public consumption.

George was a man called George Wingrave, who worked in a bank, while Harris’s real name was Carl Hentschel, a character of Polish origins whose father introduced photo-etching into the United Kingdom. The author of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome himself, was the child of a father who, like Trollope’s, seems to have a God’s gift for losing money. His parents died when he was in his teens and Jerome was brought up in desperately respectable poverty in the East End. Before becoming a hack writer, he had been in a company of travelling players who sound not unlike Vincent Crumbles’s outfit in Nicholas Nickelby. The narrative is a distillation of journeys the three young men made around the Thames just as they were all starting out in life. All three of them represent the kind of clerk created by the 1870s education acts, anatomised brilliantly by John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses as the targets of snobbery and disdain from the kind of well-heeled people who still, today, look down their noses at Three Men in a Boat.

But these three rather sad sounding characters (you only have to dip into Jerome’s other works to catch the smell of a grim religiosity and anxiety about status that becomes inimical to any kind of humour) somehow become transformed into a trio that seems to summarise all the best things about being young and male and out for a bit of a laugh. The way they irritate each other (Harris’s comic song has to be one of the funniest, wickedest and yet most amiable portrayals ever of the kind of thing we have to tolerate in our friends), compete with each other (the passage about rowing stoke and bow) and, while urging each other on to the kind of male behaviour that the world expects of them, are, fundamentally, a great trio of babies whose only real wish is to be tucked up in a first class supper club in the region of Piccadilly.

Jerome did not set out to write Three Men in a Boat as a comic piece. He had, in fact, been commissioned to provide some words on the Thames which were to be “history mixed up with comic relief”. The editor slung out most of the history and left us (fortunately) with all the stuff about waiting for the kettle to boil or the difficulty of putting up tents in the rain. Although he tried to follow up his hit with a sequel (Three Men on the Brummel) it simply wasn’t as funny and most of the rest of his output is either unspeakably whimsical or pious in a way that has not survived the test of time. He made his way in the world – a friend of Conan Doyle, the editor of a successful magazine and the author of a dull, but successful play called The Passing of the Third Floor Back - on the back of this one masterpiece. And it is impossible to overestimate the importance of chance in the book’s triumph. Nothing in it is calculated. Its very clumsiness (much in evidence in the middle section) seems to reinforce the artless, improvisatory tone of the flights of comic fantasy, and when, finally, we come to the essence of the work we find that Jerome has, without really intending to, anatomised that wonderful, slightly mawkish passion that lurks in the heart of every Englishman. Three Men in a Boat is a truthful book in spite of its attempts to lie, a comic work precisely because of its attempts to inform, and eternally readable because, in spite of its stated aim of being insignificant and a-historical, it gives us a unique picture of the Edwardian world before the First War, the moment when England had confidence and steam trains and the world of the Home Countries seemed set to continue in prosperity forever.

LINKS:

Three Men in a Boat

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