The funny thing about humour is that critics don’t like it: early reviews lambasted Three Men in a Boat. Incidentally, so were works of Charles Dickens – while visiting Moscow in the 1970s, I was bemused to receive many expressions of sympathy, for what were believed to be the impoverished conditions in England, as my hosts plied me with extra helpings of borshch. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) has been continuously in print since 1889 and sold millions.ĭespite its very Englishness – who else would name a dog Montmorency? – Three Men in a Boat had international influence, becoming required reading for literature in Russian school curricula. So what is the secret of a book that has kept us laughing for 124 years? Jerome K. If you enjoyed Three Men in a Boat, you might like Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, also available in Penguin Classics.Humour, the most idiosyncratic of emotions, often evades the writer who tries to be funny. He later went on to become one of the founders of the humorous magazine, The Idler, and continued to write articles and plays.
His first book, On Stage and Off, a collection of humorous pieces about the theatre, was published in 1885, and was followed the year after with the more commercially-successful The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow but it was with Three Men in a Boat (1889) that Jerome achieved lasting fame.
He left school at fourteen to become a railway clerk, the first in a long line of jobs that included actor, teacher and journalist. Jerome (1859-1927) was born in Walstall, Staffordshire, and educated at Marylebone Grammar School. Jerome's life and times, and the changing world of Victorian England he depicts - from the rise of a new mass-culture of tabloids and bestselling novels to crazes for daytripping and bicycling. In his introduction, Jeremy Lewis examines Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian 'clerking classes', it hilariously captured the spirit of its age. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency.
and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat includes an introduction and notes by Jeremy Lewis in Penguin Classics. A comic masterpiece that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1889, Jerome K.
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