This article appeared in the Evening Standard on 1 September 1982.
THREE MEN IN A BOAT by Jerome K. Jerome, assisted by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green (Michael Joseph, £12.50)
By Tom Sharpe
THIS is a remarkable book. It contains Jerome’s original comic novel, an interesting preface by Mr Green, 217 notes on the text set in the margin, 58 photographs, 82 other illustrations, nine maps, 192 pages and, on my wife’s kitchen scales, weighs 2lb.
Those are the facts. I put them in because I am at a loss to know what to write about the book itself.
For one thing, it is almost impossible to read. Certainly only someone with tunnel vision could hope to read Jerome’s own story without being distracted by the notes in the margin. I haven’t bothered to count the number of pages without any notes but they can’t run to more than a dozen and even those probably have diverting illustrations in the margin.
To give you some idea, Jerome’s preface, a mere stripling of 16 lines in bold print, is cornered by 98 lines of annotation in extremely fine print which contain the fascinating information that Jerome was wrong in stating that Montmorency the dog was not a poetic ideal but a thing of flesh and blood, that George Harris on the other hand did exist, that in later life Jerome became a dog-lover, in particular of a Great Dane called Max, and was grief-stricken when Max contracted cancer of the throat and had to be destroyed.
And that is Note 1. Having got off to this jolly start, Note 2 deals with the effect on popular literature of Forster’s 1870 Education Act by the time Jerome published Three Men in a Boat in 1889, names various books and journals, deals briefly with the deaths of George Eliot, Carlisle, Disraeli, Rossetti, Darwin, Trollope, Wilkie Collins and Martin Tucker, a court decision preventing women from sitting on the London County Council, the Fall of Parnell, more deaths, this time of Browning and John Bright—not to mention General Gordon, the dock strike, the publication of Fabian essays and Lloyd George’s campaign to become an MP for Carmarthen Boroughs.
And all this as far as I can tell because Jerome was ass enough to date his preface August 1889. God knows what the reader would have got had he written it in 1914.
The rest of the book continues in the same vein. On Page 49 (of the annotated edition, of course, because both page 48 and 49 are devoted entirely to notes and Three Men in a Boat has been left behind on half of Page 47) there’s an extremely detailed explanation of the horrors of the Great Coram Street Murder involving a prostitute, Harriet Buswell, whose throat was cut from ear to ear, the German vessel the Wangerland, bound for Brazil, that ran aground on the Goodwin Sands . . .
By the time I had read the account at the bottom of Page 50 I had forgotten about Biggs’s Boy in the story who had started the thing off.
That is the whole point of this edition. It has nothing to do with Jerome’s light-hearted story. It is a fascinating work of eclectic scholarship by two experts on late Victorian social history with a nicely concealed sense of humour.
It is not a book one can’t put down but it is difficult not to pick it up again later on.