Three Men in a Boat (2 page)

Jerome was twelve when his father died, revealing on his death-bed that his thick, black pelt of hair was a wig. The family moved to Finchley, and two years later Jerome left school and became the sole bread-winner. Like many others at the time, he got a job as a clerk: the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw a phenomenal rise in the number of clerks employed in offices, most of them poor, undereducated and overworked, and he took a clerical job with the London and North-Western Railway at Euston, earning ten shillings a week. The following year his mother died, and – with his brother dead, one sister married, and the other a governess in the north of England – Jerome was alone in the world. He moved into a series of digs, in one of which a fellow lodger had hanged himself.

Even at this early age, Jerome longed to be a writer, and in
Paul Kelver
he describes how, as a boy, he once met Dickens – or someone he assumed to be Dickens – wandering about in Hackney. ‘No man ever made money or fame but by writing his very best,’ the Dickens figure tells him. ‘If you write books thinking only of money you will be disappointed. It is easier earned in other ways.’ Young Kelver forgets to ask Dickens his name. ‘That makes me think of your future with hope,’ the novelist tells him, no doubt recognizing a kindred spirit. ‘You are an egotist, Paul; and that is the beginning of all art.’ Since Dickens died in 1870, Jerome must have been very young when and if this meeting occurred: he referred to it again in his autobiography, where the great man lets fly with ‘Oh, damn Mr Pickwick!’

When not consorting with important novelists, Jerome set out to
master the worldly vices, among them smoking, drinking and girls: ‘baccy’ was to prove a lifetime’s enthusiasm, but where women were concerned, ‘To be on a footing of familiarity with a barmaid was the height of most young clerks’ ambition.’ To add variety to his life, and give himself something to write about, he involved himself with the theatre in his spare time – not something that would have pleased his Low Church parents, who regarded the theatre and its dependents with grave suspicion. He joined a repertory company, producing playbills, doing the advertising, stage-managing, and, in due course, appearing on stage himself. Eventually he gave up his job on the railways to spend nearly three years travelling round England with a touring company, leading the kind of life enjoyed by the Crummles family in Dickens’s
Nicholas Nickleby
nearly half a century earlier. It was, he wrote, a ‘jungle sort of existence’: crooked managers made off with their wages, they slept in dressing-rooms or church porches, and he ‘played every part in
Hamlet
save Ophelia’.

Back in London, Jerome lived rough for a while, moving on from one doss-house to another and enduring the same kind of poverty-stricken existence as his near-contemporary George Gissing. Still anxious to learn his trade as a writer, he bumped into an old friend who ‘had fallen on evil days, and had taken to journalism’. The friend suggested that he tried his luck as a Dickensian jobbing journalist, ‘penny-a-lining’ from all over London and covering fêtes, fires, court cases, coroners’ inquests, public meetings and even hangings (‘There was a coffee shop at the Old Bailey where, for half-a-crown, they let you climb on the roof’). When penny-a-lining lost its allure, he worked for a term as a schoolmaster, teaching swimming, gymnastics and deportment, before moving on to be the secretary to a builder, and then a commission agent. He lodged for a time near the British Museum, the haunt of penniless, Gissing-like
⁹
Grub Street hacks, and then shared a room off the Tottenham Court Road with a bank clerk called George Wingrave. Wingrave turned out to have a shrewd business sense, and in due course helped his friend in his dealings with editors and publishers; whether – like his namesake in
Three Men in a Boat
– he found it hard to get out of bed in the morning is not recorded.

Another new friend from this period was Carl Hentschel, the ‘Harris’ of the novels. Polish by origin, Hentschel’s father had introduced photolithography to Britain. It was a process that helped to revolutionize the Press, making it far easier and quicker to reproduce illustrations in newspapers and magazines, since the slow and laborious business of hand-engraving the blocks from which they were printed could now be done by mechanical means. Its introduction enabled newspaper editors and their proprietors to include not just line drawings and photographs, but display advertisements of the kind that horrified the more fastidious type of reader, and it coincided with vast changes in the nature and accessibility of the printed word. Whereas books, newspapers and magazines had hitherto been, to a large extent, the preserve of the educated minority, they now braced themselves for the advent of that twentieth-century phenomenon, the mass market. Although the great majority of the population still left school at fourteen, Forster’s Education Act had created an immense new market of potential readers. ‘Never before had there been such reading masses,’ wrote H. G. Wells, while according to Bernard Shaw, ‘The Education Act was producing readers who had never before bought books, nor could have read them if they had.’ Many of these new readers were employed, like George or Mr Pooter, as clerks in banks, insurance offices, estate agents and the like; many of them lived in the new suburbs which – to the horror of the intelligentsia – were spreading out around London and the other great cities, addressed one another as ‘Old Man’, and employed a slang of their own, half-jocular and half-defiant. Uneasily aware of their lack of education, they were often eager to remedy matters through evening classes and the reading of classics in Everyman editions, and tended – if young, and of a radical persuasion – to bicycling, socialism and the wearing of knickerbockers. As Jerome would soon discover, they were looked down upon by writers and social commentators who had enjoyed the benefits of a university education, and regarded the upstart clerks and their spokesmen as bumptious philistines.

As John Carey observed in
The Intellectuals and the Masses
, ‘the clerks were hardly equipped to appreciate “high” culture, which is
why an alternative culture was created for them.’ Alfred Harmsworth,
¹⁰
the founder of the
Daily Mail
, took full advantage of the new technologies to cater to a mass readership, while his dependence on advertising enabled him to price his papers at levels even the hard-up could afford, and at the same time undercut sober, old-fashioned rivals. New magazines and periodicals proliferated, many of them – like
Tit-Bits, Answers
and
Comic Cuts
– responding to the concerns of the newly literate classes with hints on etiquette, bicycling columns and snippets of self-improvement. Nor was literary fare neglected. Although
Tit-Bits
– which George Newnes
¹¹
founded in 1881 – rejected work by Conrad and Virginia Woolf, it made a point of reprinting excerpts from classic authors; John Carey subversively suggests that ‘As a means of awakening interest in books, arousing curiosity and introducing its readers to new ideas,
Tit-Bits
must compare very favourably with more acclaimed organs such as T. S. Eliot’s
Criterion
and F. R. Leavis’s
Scrutiny
, and its effects were infinitely more widespread.’ Some of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in
Tit-Bits
, as well as in the
Strand Magazine
, and although the serialization of novels was a well-established Victorian tradition, the novel itself was not immune to the challenges presented by new markets and new readers. The bulky and expensive three-decker novel, beloved of the great Victorians and of Mudie’s Lending Library,
¹²
gave way, in part, to shorter, more accessible works; the middlebrow bestseller became a staple of the publishing business, selling in huge quantities to homebound commuters from W. H. Smith’s
¹³
railway bookstalls. Jerome was typical of this new mass readership, and in due course
Three Men in a Boat
, itself a bestseller, would be denounced by the literary establishment for its ‘vulgarity’ and for the ‘colloquial clerks’ English’ in which it was written. But, as Carey points out, ‘Jerome was consciously wooing a new readership: the perky clerks and shop assistants, the Mr Pollys
¹⁴
and Lupin Pooters,
¹⁵
whose stripy blazers and half-starved features still gaze triumphantly from a thousand photographs,’ and although ‘the genteel highbrows of the next generation – Forster, Virginia Woolf, Eliot – were to sneer at this whole breed, clerks were Jerome’s class, and he liked them – especially
the jaunty, stoical way they took life’s knocks’. When, early in the next century, the right-wing poet T. W. H. Crosland savaged the clerking classes and all they stood for in his polemic
The Suburbans
, he noted that Wells, Shaw and Jerome, all of whom had worked as clerks, were the favourite authors of those he most despised.

But before any of this could take place, Jerome had to find his way into print. It proved a long, dispiriting business, with evenings given over to writing after a tiring day in a solicitor’s office, and the amassing of a hefty wodge of rejection letters. In the end
The Lamp
accepted a story, and the author of another magazine handed a dazed Jerome five pounds in exchange for something he had written. Persistence had paid off at last, and before long Jerome was writing ‘Idle Thoughts’ for F. W. Robinson’s
Home Chimes
, fellow-contributors to which included Mark Twain, Algernon Charles Swinburne and J. M. Barrie,
¹⁶
who was soon to become a close friend. (An affectation of idleness was to become one of Jerome’s
leitmotifs
: as V. S. Pritchett remarked, hard-working and browbeaten clerks – all of whom, like George, worked on Saturdays until lunchtime, as well as long hours during the week – liked to pose as men of leisure and to ‘regard idleness as a joke’,
¹⁷
and J. tells us that he and his fellow-oarsmen all affect a ‘general disinclination to work of any kind’.)

Published in 1885, Jerome’s first book,
On the Stage – and Off
, drew on his theatrical experiences. It was followed a year later by
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
, in which he established a recognizable and distinctive tone of voice: colloquial, discursive, both fanciful and commonsensical. Dedicated, at some length, to his pipe, it consisted of ruminative, mildly humorous essays on unalarming, everyday subjects – ‘On Being Shy’, ‘On Being Hard-Up’, ‘Getting on in the World’, ‘Cats and Dogs’ – served up with rueful, rather resigned nuggets of worldly wisdom such as might have been accompanied, if spoken, by some sagacious knocking out or tamping of the pipe. It was a genre of
belles-lettres
that lay in a direct line of descent from the essays of Addison and Charles Lamb, flourished in Edwardian England, reached its nadir in
The Times
fourth leaders, and was mercilessly ridiculed by Cyril Connolly
in
Enemies of Promise
.
Idle Thoughts
was dismissed by the critics, who derided Jerome as ’Arry K. ’Arry, and an example of the ‘new humorist’ at his worst. ‘The
Standard
spoke of me as a menace to English letters; the
Morning Post
as an example of the sad results to be expected of the over-education of the lower orders’ – but it sold over 20,000 copies in Britain, and did well in America too.

Life 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 togged out in the height of fashion. By 1895 some 400 steam-launches were operating on the river; they were resented by oarsmen and fishermen for the noise they made,
for the clouds of black smoke belching from their funnels and for the wash they set up, and their owners were widely regarded as pompous, self-important, overweight and overfond of the bottle.