Three Men by Jerome K. Jerome is a Product of its Time—and that's a Tragedy

Like contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, Victorian author Jerome K. Jerome’s dual travelogues Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel are famous not for their status as high art but for the ripples they have left behind. In 1889 when it was first printed, Three Men in a Boat was a commercial hit among the ‘clerking classes’ which it satirized, and 11 years later he reunited his protagonists for a bicycle tour of Wilhelmine Germany. My own Penguin Classics bind-up of the two books praises them for “hilariously captur[ing] the spirit of their age.” But their Zeitgeist is novel. They are not The Great Gatsby. They are not The Hate U Give.

That is not to say that they are bad books.

The vision of three wide-eyed Englishmen (with an optional scrappy Fox Terrier) rowing incompetently down the Thames has left an impression on the artistic psyche, even if they are not as potent as works of Dickens and Wilde. I first encountered Three Men in a Boat while reading the dramaturgical notes for Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love. The latter utilizes Jerome’s imagery to comment on the paranoia, repression and romanticization of Victorian England. As Stoppard’s characters state, every age is someone else’s Golden Age, and Jerome's cheery, middle-class world often falls prey to undeserved nostalgia. The problems of the titular characters are small-scale and self-inflicted; the narrative low point for Three Men in a Boat is the dramatic failure to open a tin of pineapple chunks. But Jerome K. Jerome is not gazing back on a bygone era with nostalgia. He is a primary source, and glimmers of prescience appear in his stories like flashes of sun on the Thames.

Our own foreknowledge is the key to Three Men in a Boat, which is set almost entirely in Germany before the First World War. J., the hapless narrator of both stories, characterizes the country and its people as basically decent but obsessed with order and numb to violence. By 1914, these preoccupations will lead Germany and England into two of the bloodiest wars in modern history. But neither J. nor his author know that. They are busy admiring the modern Spielpltäze, disparaging the local beer and getting into altercations with the police.

“The German Nation is still young, and its maturity is of importance to the world. They are a good people, a lovable people, who should help much to make the world better. The worst that can be said against them is that they have their failings. They themselves do not know this; they consider themselves perfect, which is foolish of them.” (346)

It’s protagonists, too, are relics of that vanished age. J., George and Harris are less-than-brilliant; they are everyday Englishmen in a comedic novel. George plays the banjo. J. is a hypochondriac. Harris is supremely confident in his sense of direction. Together, they make grandiose plans, debate the minutiae of householdery, and pretend to understand international politics. On a few disturbing occasions, they casually use racial slurs. They travel far, even when they don’t appreciate it. But they are trapped. Despite their desire to escape fin-de-siecle society, J, George, and Harris are prisoners of their time. Only Montmorency, their terrier, can live freely and authentically.

Have I mentioned both books are quite funny? They’re quite funny. The misadventures of ordinary men are a timeless source of laughter, and Jerome gives J. a strong, narrative voice. But the “halo of age” has already begun to obscure their heads, and the inexhaustible Montmorency has spent longer on a pedestal than is entirely healthy for a dog of his temperament.

“All our art treasures of today are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is any real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in their eyes.” (45)

At least Jerome is self-aware.