Blog Nº 2
“What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over”
I thought I would kick-start my blog by discussing one of English literature’s most enduringly funny novels. Written in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome concocted the perfect comic tale to match the trend for recreational boating in the late Victorian era. I for one am very glad that this work, originally meant to be a travel piece for Home Chimes magazine, morphed into the hilarious escapades of three men holidaying in a boat. In the words of Jerome himself, ‘nothing else seemed right’.
The general premise of the novel is three City clerks – J. (the narrator), George and Harris – taking a two-week boating trip along the Thames from Kingston to Oxford and back again (which is particularly enjoyable for me to read as a Kingston-dweller). We cannot, of course, forget their canine companion Montmorency, not least because the subtitle of the book commands us not to (to say nothing of the Dog!). What follows is a humorous voyage of mishaps, both on this trip and through anecdotes that spring to the narrator’s mind along the way.
What I enjoy the most about Jerome’s novel is its refreshing triviality. Unlike a lot of Victorian novels, there are no devastating plot twists or stories of unrequited love; like the boat, the novel trundles along, and is at once about lots of things and about nothing at all, and that’s where its charm derives. The most dramatic things to happen are perhaps one of the party falling into the river, or getting lost in Hampton Court Maze, or even that (shock horror!) there are no inns to stay in at a certain point of the trip. Such novels are sometimes overlooked in the rankings of great literature, but I think they are uniquely brilliant when they can still make us laugh over 100 years after publication.
Indeed, Jerome’s use of quintessentially English humour is such that an English audience can still very much relate and laugh along. For example, in one sentence he manages to sum up the immortal English outlook on the weather. That is, ‘but who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand’. If this does not define Englishness I don’t know what does.
However, for me, one particularly funny incident stands out. After a long hard day on the river, our three “hangry” gentlemen despair that there is no mustard to go with their beef. However it is deemed that ‘life was worth living after all’ when they discover a tin of pineapple. Sadly for them (although happily for us), there is no tin-opener to be found, so what ensues is ‘a fearful battle’ between the men and the tin. A hilarious sequence of imaginative attempts to open the tin to no avail complete with extreme frustration from the protagonists provides an overwhelmingly relatable comic thread inspired by ordinary everyday inconveniences.
Contributed to by the chuckle-worthy bumbling about of our three men in a boat and their beautifully eloquent nineteenth-century language, Jerome paints quite the picture of nonchalant, carefree joy and timeless Victorian farce. The fact that Three Men in a Boat sold staggeringly well at the time and has never gone out of print since it first appeared in 1889 suggests that the British reading public wholeheartedly agrees with my assessment.
If you’re looking for a light-hearted summer read to enjoy while sunbathing in your back garden (or, indeed, Thames-side) then Three Men in a Boat is the one for you. To really get into the spirit I would advise snacking on beef and mustard and/or tinned pineapple while reading…
Happy reading!
Imo x
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