“Three Men in a Boat” is one of those rare books, a funny book, that continues to stand the test of time, be listed as a Greatest Book, and has never been out of print. It defies the standard idea of a novel, the building up to grand conflict, complex relationships, careful denouement, or even a substantial plot. So what it is about the book that makes it so well-loved even 123 years later?[break]
Jerome K. Jerome was himself bewildered by its success. He hadn’t even set out to write a funny book. The book was an idea borne after the honeymoon he and his wife had spent on a riverboat on Thames. But Jerome was a veteran on those waters, and had traveled in a boat many times with his friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, on whom the fictional characters, George and Harris, are based. The dog, Montmorency, he admitted was entirely fictional, an embodiment of the human consciousness, if you will.
The language of the book is formal by today’s standards. But back then, it was considered “vulgar” by critics for its use of slang. The structure is simple: a journey story. To be specific, a weeklong journey in a boat down River Thames from London to Oxford and back. On this simple structural frame hang the anecdotes that reveal the characteristics of the four friends: J., the author, Harris, George, and Montmorency, the dog. These anecdotes are sharp and witty observations of the behaviors of the four friends, which in turn reflect the universal behaviors of all human beings. And in the strength of the relation of these anecdotes lies the book’s comic humor and success.
Take for instance the anecdote that the book opens with when J. reads a medical book on symptoms of various illnesses and realizes he has everything except Housemaid’s Knee. How many of us know such people, or rather, are there such people? Then there are these flashes of eternal truth, such as: “How good one feels when one is full – how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.”
And there are those witty lines that are sometimes mistakenly attributed to Oscar Wilde: “It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
However, the book also sometimes waxes eloquent about the night on the river from the boat, or imagines the signing of the Magna Carta. And these sections, which attempt to be beautiful and descriptive, are perhaps the most unsuccessful parts of the book. Granted, it does add to J.’s character and give his character a romantic streak, but there are moments when such parts could have been edited out and the chapters made more succinct. Again, the question arises, would it be okay to cut out the weaker parts or do the weaker parts make the stronger sections even more so?
Either way, Three Men in a Boat never ceases to be funny. Even its topical humor from a hundred years ago has contexts that modern readers can relate to. You can read the book many times and the anecdotes will still make you laugh, make you want to read it out loud to whoever is around you, and repeat it afterward to whoever will listen to you.
When it was published in 1889, the book’s immediate and lasting success surprised even its author. Nobody relates the Victorian era with humor but it was toward its end that Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) was published. And in this era when serious books dominate the publishing world, we need some smart, comic writing to fall back on from time to time, and Jerome’s book is still a safe bet, a classic bestseller with anecdotes that have been much anthologized.
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