Three Men in a Boat Read Online Free

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.
    Understandably enough, those who lived along the river did all they could to benefit from the boom. Firms like Salter Brothers in Oxford sold or hired out boats; riverside pubs and hotels did brisk business; office workers who couldn’t afford a hotel or felt that a breath of fresh air would do them good, and chose instead to camp out, on land or in their boats, could buy or hire tents, hampers, bedding and the like. An Edwardian enthusiast described how shops like that visited by George, Harris J. and Montmorency (p. 114 ) were ‘stocked with the first object of supplying boat-parties and campers with the necessaries of life’. Among these, tinned food played an important part, so much so that ‘the shop-windows are almost completely furnished with supplies of tinned everything, festering in the sun’. Observant as ever, John Carey has noted how tinned food came to be symptomatic of the debasement of the masses ‘because it offends against what the intellectual designates as nature: it is mechanical and soulless’. T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene and John Betjeman all wrote about tinned food with a furious disdain; Jerome, on the other hand, found it ‘genial and amusing’, and one of the most famous set pieces in the book revolves about an unopened and unopenable tin of pineapple chunks.
    Unrepentant consumers of tinned foods, George, Harris and J. set out in search of mild adventure, very much in the spirit of Mr Pickwick and his young friends much earlier in the century. Like
The Pickwick Papers, Three Men in a Boat
is an innocent, inconsequential idyll, crammed with digressions and irrelevancies and authorial asides and all the other garrulous pleasantries of the picaresque novel, honed down for a more impatient generation of readers. V. S. Pritchett 17 – one of the very few critics to have written about
Three Men in a Boat
– sees Jerome as belonging, with the Grossmith brothers and his close friend W. W. Jacobs, 18 to a ‘small, secure Arcadia where the comic disasters of life are the neater for being low’, and his humour as ‘a response of the emerging lower middle class to the inconvenience of their situation’. Well meant as this is –Pritchett himself came from a not dissimilar background to Jerome, and writes as an admirer – it doesn’t quite ring true. Jerome’s Thames is, for the most part, a good deal more Arcadian than ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, the Pooters’ terraced house in Holloway, replete as it is