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FREE THREE MEN IN A BOAT: AND THREE MEN ON THE BUMMEL PDF Jerome K. Jerome,Jeremy Lewis | 400 pages | 03 Sep 2013 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780140437508 | English | London, United Kingdom Three Men – The Facts – The Jerome K Jerome Society One terrible mishap had followed another in the course of the trip and the amused Kington asked Boothroyd if the story was true. All that has been done is to colour them; and, for this, no extra charge has been made. Well, no. There really were three friends — George Wingrave, Carl Hentschel and Jerome himself — on whom Jerome based his main characters, who made literally scores of trips up and down the Thames and cycled together across Europe to the Black Forest. Only Montmorency never existed. Jerome J. The landlady suggested that, to save money, the two might share a room. George, who remained a bachelor, rose to become manager of Barclays Bank in the Strand and outlived the other two, dying at the age of 79 in March At only 23 he set up on his own, the start of a long and distinguished career, one which merited an obituary in The Times. Again, it was the theatre that cemented the friendship with Jerome. He died in Januaryleaving a wife and three children. Induring the West End run of his one-man adaptation of Three Men in a Boatthe present writer was introduced to a sprightly, elderly lady. She had much enjoyed the performance, she said, and it was a book she knew extremely well. So there were the ready-made characters, save one little Jeromian twist. Throughout Three Men in a Boatreaders are left in no doubt that Harris is fond of a drink: there is the episode of the swans at Shiplake and the reference to the small number of pubs in the country which Harris has not visited. There were also ready-made events: for instance, the melodramatic story of the drowned woman at Goring Chapter 16 is based on the tragic suicide in July of a Gaiety Girl named Alicia Douglas. Jerome almost certainly Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel the story in the local newspaper. It was only in the mids that the Thames had been discovered as a pleasure-ground. London was expanding at the rate of knots to use a suitably nautical term and the middle- and working-class population suddenly woke up to the recreational potential of the great river, with its towns, villages and watering holes lying only a cheap rail fare away. Boating on the Thames became the latest craze: inthe year in which Jerome wrote Three Men in a Boatthere were 8, registered boats on the river; by the Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel year there were 12, In other words, plenty of excursions to provide a writer with plenty of material. Jerome had, by this time, been a journalist, his first published book, On the Stage and Offhad successfully used his all-too-real experiences as a professional actor to great comic effect, and The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow had proved his gift as a humorous essayist: a magpie like Jerome would have brought his notebook to the river. Idle Thoughts had been serialised in the monthly magazine Home Chimes and it was its editor, F. It seemed to be all humorous relief. By grim determination I succeeded… in writing a dozen or so slabs of history and working them in, one to each chapter. The first instalment came out in the August issue ofthe last in June the following year. Jerome was wooing the Bristol publishers J. Arrowsmith who brought out the book that summer. Had Mr Arrowsmith not accepted, it would have been the literary parallel of Decca turning Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel the Beatles. Years later Arrowsmith, commenting on the amount of royalties he paid Jerome, confessed he was at a loss to know of what became of all the copies of Three Men In A Boat. Years of struggle, deprivation and uncertainty were over for good. Three Men in a Boat is now just as much part of the fabric as these noble Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel. Twenty years after it first appeared in hard covers, the book had sold overcopies in Britain and over a million throughout the United States though, as it was published before the Copyright Convention, Jerome never made a penny from the American sales. Only the German translation outsold the inordinately-successful Russian edition. It has been adapted into every performance medium — filmed three timesandtelevised by Tom Stoppard, turned into a musical by Hubert Gregg, made into a stage play on several occasions, read aloud on radio and spoken-word cassette numerous times and, at least twice, done the rounds as a one-man show. It has never been out of print. In a foreword to the edition Jerome remained puzzled as to the reasons for the undiminished popularity of Three Men in a Boat. Not that Jerome ever occupied the same Olympian heights as Beethoven; no one has ever mistaken him as a great literary thinker. Somebody once accused H. He was not a virtuosic comic novelist able to concoct the joyously-improbable plots of a Wodehouse, Waugh or Tom Sharpe though it is extraordinary how many people assume that Jerome was a contemporary of Wodehouse. He was better at the scherzo than the symphony. Within these limitations he was a master. Compare the opening paragraph of Three Men in a Boat with the clumsy opening passage as it first appeared in Home Chimes :. It is very odd, but good grammar always sounds so stiff and strange to me. I suppose it is having been brought up in our family that is the cause of this. Well, there we were, sitting in my room, smoking, and talking, and talking about how bad we were — bad from a medical point of view, I mean, of course. It is as though Jerome felt obliged to insert a four-part fugue in the middle of a popular song, merely in order to give the critics something to chew. The construction of the book, too, is lop-sided: we are nearly a third of the way through the book before anyone rows a stroke, and the return journey is accomplished in eleven brief pages out of Its shortcomings have never mattered one jot to succeeding generations of devoted fans. What was entirely new about Boat was the style in which it was written. Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson were widely read and highly popular but Jerome differed in two respects: his story was not of some fantastical adventure in a far-off land, peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, but of three very ordinary blokes having a high old time just down the road, so to speak; and, in an age when literary grandiloquence and solemnity were not in short Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome provided a breath of fresh air. The Victorians had simply never come across anything like it. Jerome photographed in Monks Corner, his house in Maidenhead, beneath the portrait of him by De Laszlo. Jerome was taken to task by the serious critics. True, it is not on the same exalted level, but it is written with the same verve and energy, and the set pieces the boot shop, Harris and his wife on the tandem, Harris confronting the hose-pipe, the animal riot in the hill- top restaurant are as polished and funny funnier, some would say as anything in the earlier book. Jerome is also uncannily perceptive about the political catastrophes that were so shortly to overtake the country. He can stray from the present adventure as much as he likes, he can stop for his set pieces whether they be on the river or elsewhere, he Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel recall events from previous trips the cheeses taken from Liverpool to London, the visit to Hampton Court maze Three Men in a Boat: and Three Men on the Bummel, but the river holds the whole thing together and gives the book its satisfying unity. The best television situation comedies rely on this same device, a world with clearly-defined parameters. A ramble through Germany and the Black Forest does not provide that. That is, if I did write it. For really I hardly remember doing so. I remember only feeling very young and absurdly pleased with myself for reasons that concern only myself. Miles Kington tells a story that encapsulates perfectly the art of the English humorist as personified by Jerome and exemplified in these two life-enhancing books. Basil Boothroyd had just returned from holiday. Kington bumped into him. Have a good holiday? This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website. Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. 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