CHAPTER 9

Jerome K. Jerome’s Humoristic Idleness

in Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing
of the Dog!) (1889): Lightness and Longing

A brief look at Jerome K. Jerome’s biography makes one wonder how

he could turn into a model idler of the late Victorian era, that is a man
who treated the subject lightly and defined himself through positively
understood idling, both in life and as a writer. Jerome’s youth began
with a translocation. Born in 1859 in Walsall, he grew up in a stable
middle-class home. His second name, Klapka, is not a variation of his
father’s second name, Clapp, but the name of a famous Hungarian gen-
eral, George Klapka, who was an exile and often a guest of the Jeromes
(cf. Moss 1928, 49).1 When Jerome’s father, a nonconformist preacher,
made bad investments in coal-mining later on, the family went bankrupt:
they moved to the East End of London, where the father worked as an
ironmonger. Yet one of the most memorable experiences of Jerome’s
childhood takes place when the family visits Instow, a small town at the
south-west coast:

Through the long journey, I sat with my face glued to the window. We
reached Instow in the evening. The old ferryman came forward with a
grin, and my mother shook hands with him, and all the way across they
talked of strange names and places, and sometimes my mother laughed,
and sometimes sighed. It was the first time I had been on a boat, and I was
afraid, but tried to hide it. […] [After reaching the shore] I remember the
walk up the steep hill. There was no lamps that I could see, but a strange
light was all about us, as if we were in fairyland. It was the first time that

© The Author(s) 2018 173

H. Liedke, The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts,
1850–1901, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95861-3_9
174 H. LIEDKE

I had ever climbed a hill. You had to raise your feet and bend your body. It
was just as if someone were trying to pull you backward. It all seemed very
queer. (Jerome 1926, 24, emphases added)

In the light of Jerome’s most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (1889),
this passage presents itself as a moment of initiation into the world of
boating and stories—it is noteworthy that the experience of being on
a boat is from the start linked to listening to stories of “strange names
and places”. At the same time, the passage combines fantastic elements
(a strange light surrounds the boy, he thinks he is in a fairyland) with the
queer sensation of being a corporal subject, of having a body that one
has to exercise to experience nature. In its repeated emphasis of strange-
ness, the scene is permeated by an almost mystical shrewdness and at the
same time the writer establishes an equilibrium and links the strangeness
to “real life” by referring to the physicality of his body. The passage can
thus be read alongside what I find is a thematic and stylistic focal point in
Three Men in a Boat: the idea of the sensitive individual being caught off-
guard, in an idle state of mind, and confronted with an experience that
is inexplicable until the end and that one can only awkwardly struggle to
put into words.
When his father died, Jerome quit school and worked in a variety of
jobs (cf. Böker 1979, 212; Pickford 2007, 84), among them a “two-year
stint as a travelling actor in his late teens” (Pickford 2007, 84). From the
age of 15, he was an orphan and lived alone because his sisters already
had their own families (cf. Moss 1928, 69). As Moss writes somewhat
melodramatically in his chapter entitled “Facing Life,” Jerome “lived
alone, thought alone, felt alone. Fortunately […] [h]e had an opti-
mistic temperament and knew that the blue sky always lies behind the
cloud. He had a profound purpose in life and an indomitable persever-
ance” (69–70).2 For some time, Jerome also was an idler in the sense
of a person who is unemployed and slept on the streets of London or
in dosshouses (cf. Moss 1928, 74).3 It is remarkable, therefore, and
even surprising that he was able to turn the negative kind of idleness
he was forced to live because of poverty in his early life into a posi-
tive idleness by choice in his later life in most of his writings. Indeed,
those readers familiar only with Three Men in a Boat, the (mock?) trav-
elogue, and its depiction of an “all-pervading atmosphere of leisured
‘Englishness’” (Gutch 1979, 225), may perceive of Jerome as a typical
middle-class gentleman “snugly encapsulated in the green and pleasant
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 175

land of late-Victorian England” (ibid.). Jerome can be considered as the

one who introduced the “brand” idler, as he was also the author of Idle
Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and together with Robert Barr the edi-
tor of The Idler (1892–1898), a popular nineteenth-century monthly
journal.4 Idleness as a choice is also central in his Three Men in a Boat;
it is a choice, but it is also a literary technique. In its depiction of boat-
ing as a special kind of idle activity, it also addresses a popular Victorian
fashion.
In my analysis, I will start with an assessment of the book’s critical
reception and the significance the Thames—and especially boating as a
particularly idle activity—had in the public consciousness of the time.
I will then move on to analyse in what ways idleness manifests itself in
Jerome’s (and J’s) text both on the level of content and the level of style.
The protagonists are self-proclaimed idlers who relate humorous anec-
dotes, have an aversion to work and are bored and perhaps even disap-
pointed in progress and modern civilization. The amusing passages are
complemented by more solemn ones centred around the idea of longing.
By this, I mean both the passages which depict idleness as the product of
musing fits (similar to W. H. Hudson’s poetic outbursts) and in which
the idler is primarily characterized by a Romantic longing for the past
and his rejection of the achievements of modern civilization. There are
also moments when the different types of physical activity on the river—
from rowing to sculling and steering—create experiences of “flow”
which then lead to a heightened awareness, expanded perception and a
“sense of […] widening space” (Korte 2014, 216).
Secondly, however, I will treat the text itself as an idle text in the
sense that it draws attention to its own structural lightness by being
written in a jagged style and including passages that manage to dissect
brief and compact sequences of events or actions into something in
suspension, quite reminiscent of Anna Mary Howitt’s “imaginary bub-
bles.” Other passages are not even there, yet materialize as blanks in the
imaginative space of their readers as a contrast to seemingly “heavy”
historical passages weighed down by redundant information. These pas-
sages have the exclusive purpose of being stripped away—they are not
“really” there. They are almost outrageously literal copies from Charles
Dickens, Jr.’s Dictionary of the Thames and present a successful tactic of
Jerome’s to outwit those critics who denounced the book in terms of
content—he is “giving them what they want,” and at the same time he
is not.
176 H. LIEDKE

POPULARISING ‘THAMESLAND’ AS A SPACE

FOR CARELESS IDLING

While the 1871 Education Act opened up the reading market to a much
greater public, these new readers favoured texts like Jerome’s written in a
funny, short essay style, which they could, for instance, read when com-
muting to work in the city from the suburbs (cf. Pickford 2007, 86).
As John Carey elaborates in his study The Intellectuals and the Masses:
Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, middle-
brow literature, and especially sociolects such as clerk’s slang, “annoyed”
intellectuals because it “trivialized ‘serious’ objects” in its over-familiarity
(Carey 1992, 59; Graham Greene is quoted as even wanting to kick a
clerk he once overheard talking in his particular manner). Jerome had
also worked as a clerk, among other things, before he started writing.
In his Three Men in a Boat, he turned to a space of leisure for contem-
plative idleness that had previously been reserved to the wealthy. River
Thames travel had been popularly associated with “a leisurely, pastoral,
premodern form of existence” (Byerly 2013, 138) and managed to dis-
regard the fact that by the mid-nineteenth-century large steam boats
were also navigating the Thames. By 1890, over 12,000 “pleasure-boats
[were] registered as being on the Thames” (Harrison 1890, vii)—the
river was being democratized, much like the literary sphere (cf. Pickford
2007, 86). The former was also due to the fact that, as Field points out,
while the railway companies had been slow to improve the accessibility
of the Thames, this had changed by that point, with the London and
South-Western Railway issuing tickets at moderate fares and the Great
Western Railway, “usually slow to do anything at a small charge,” offer-
ing special river coupons (Field 1894, 569). Dickens, Jr., for instance,
referred to the trip from Oxford to London on the river “as one of the
regular things to do” (Dickens 1888, 253, emphasis added)—every-
body could do it and was doing it. In the 1880s, recreational boating
on the stretch between Kingston and Oxford was in vogue. This kind
of travel was slow, thus standing in stark contrast to efficient train travel
and it self-consciously valorized an idle form of travel. The destina-
tion was not important or even non-existent (Byerly speaks of a “lack
of particularity” and an “emphasis on experience” that she identifies as
“an important source of the enduring appeal of travel on the Thames in
British culture”, 2013, 84) and the passage itself had the side-effect of
acquainting the traveller with his or her hometown London from a new
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 177

perspective. What came to the fore was the way this slow passage inspired
the traveller to start musing, reminiscing and imagining alternative real-
ities or even heterotopias5—Michel Foucault has famously described
the boat (and the ship, he uses the terms interchangeably) as “a floating
piece of space, a place without a place, that is closed in on itself” and
not only “the great instrument of economic development” but “simul-
taneously the greatest reserve of the imagination […] the heterotopia
par excellence” (Foucault 1986, 27, emphasis in original).6 Jerome’s boat
also takes on the role of the place without a place, as will be shown in the
following.
The route on the River was represented as transcending “the specific
geography of the landscape traversed” instead becoming “a journey into
the past, into the future, or into an idealized England that can only exist
in the form of passing scenes that are as distant as those of a panorama”
(Byerly 2013, 86–87). Byerly also speaks of “a strong sense of moral
superiority in the slow traveler” (2013, 139): the River Thames traveller
was another anti-tourist who desired to stay far away from the touristic
mob and boating was a decidedly idle activity.7
From a patriotic point of view “Thamesland” (Field 1894, 569) was
the most magnificent holiday destination and should be preferred over
the Rhine or Mosel. While a trip up the Thames might have been similar
to “such common touristic jaunts as a trip up the Rhine, […] Victorian
writers about the Thames create[d] a deliberate contrast with the foreign
tours to which their audiences were accustomed” presenting the latter
as the more authentic experience (Byerly 2013, 85–86). In “Boating on
the Thames” (1870), Margaret Oliphant wrote of the “silvery reaches of
the Thames” (460) and “the silent course of a historic stream connected
with a thousand memories at once more homely and more dear” (460)
which would speak to “the traveller of fine taste and poetic eye” (460).
It was 1870, the year of the Franco–Prussian War, and the Rhine had
“exchanged tourists for soldiers” and was thus “closed” (460). While the
descriptions sound somewhat gaudy, they are in fact patriotic valoriza-
tions of the English country over Germany; at a time when many English
people were travelling to foreign countries, this text tried to make the
home country as a holiday destination more attractive. The tone was
very similar in Field’s article (1894, thus closer to the date of Jerome’s
publication) which outlined that “[t]he difficulties usually put forth by
those who prefer the Rhine or Moselle to the little English stream has,
178 H. LIEDKE

till recent years, been its inaccessibility,” but “there is no fairer holiday
ground in Europe than the tract watered by fair Isis.” He emphatically
concluded that “[t]he Rhine, the Moselle, ay, and the mighty Danube,
cannot put before you a prettier picture than this” (Field 1894, 569).
The Thames Guide Book uses a similar phraseology.8
Thus, a text that broke with this tradition, like Jerome’s, and dis-
regarded the preferences of the literary establishment at that time was
bound to evoke appalled reactions and have a precarious position in the
literary discourse. As a funny book written in colloquial English about
the Thames, it seemed to undermine three “institutions” held dear by
the Victorians. There is also an echo of an observation I made earlier
on with regard to the (upper) middle-class Victorians’ attitude towards
leisure: there often was, it seems, a pronounced aversion, and still so in
the later part of the nineteenth century, to “comfortable leisure.” Much
like the English only enjoyed what they were expected and supposed to
enjoy (and these could be both cultural events, sports and the reading
of literary texts), an “Englishman [thought] he [was] moral when he
[was] only uncomfortable”, to take up a remark made by ‘The Devil’
in G. B. Shaw’s Man and Superman (1905, 102). A book that resem-
bled a transcript of conversations since it was written the way people
spoke about something as popular as a boating trip had to cause par-
ticular feelings of scorn among the (upper) middle classes who wanted
to assert their societal position precisely in contrast to the more com-
mon folk of the middle classes. They would have been undermining their
(societal) selves if they, in the privacy and vulnerability of their homes,
had been reading about a way of life and a way of speaking that they
wanted to define themselves against and get away from. Many of those
readers did not appreciate that Jerome was, similar to earlier writers
such as Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne, a humourist who had
“weave[d] the serious side of life throughout [his] amazing narratives”
(Baker 1994, 207).
Those who did not regard Three Men in a Boat as a literary book but
a guidebook were lured into a trap. On the one hand, it does depict the
actual route of the popular trip from London to Oxford.9 Originally,
Jerome even wanted to write a historical book called A Story of the
Thames based on the trips the three friends, namely “J.” (Jerome him-
self), “Harris” (Carl Hentschel) and “George” (George Wingrave),
undertook over the course of several years. Yet “his sense of humour
ran away with him” (see Moss 1928, 142, also for Hentschel’s remark
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 179

that the incidents related actually took place). Still, some descriptions
read almost like passages from a conventional handbook for tourists, for
instance:

Goring on the left bank and Streatley on the right are both or either
charming places to stay at for a few days. The reaches down to Pangbourne
woo one for a sunny sail or for a moonlight row, and the country round
about is full of beauty. We had intended to push on to Wallingford that
day, but the sweet smiling face of the river here lured us to linger for a
while; and so we left our boat at the bridge, and went up into Streatley,
and lunched at the ‘Bull’; much to Montmorency’s satisfaction. They say
that the hills on each side of the stream here once joined and formed a bar-
rier across what is now the Thames, and that then the river ended there
above Goring in one vast lake. (TMB 161, emphases added)10

This passage abounds with what Robert T. Tally would call “‘You are
here’ arrow[s],” that is starting points from which space can be imagined
and navigated (Tally 2013, 2) and deictic markers that again root both
the protagonists of the scene and the readers engaged in imaginary travel
firmly in a specific place. Yet this positioning and reassuring only lasts for
a brief moment because the narrator continues:

I am not in a position either to contradict or affirm this statement, I sim-

ply offer it. It is an ancient place, Streatley, dating back, like most river-
side towns and villages, to British and Saxon times. Goring is not nearly so
pretty a little spot to stop at as Streatley, if you have your choice; but it is
passing fair enough in its way, and is nearer the railway in case you want to
slip off without paying your hotel bill. (TMB 161)

The readers cannot expect any reassuring guidance from the narrator,
and he is simply offering bits and pieces of information, whether they are
accurate or not. Even more unheard of, a location of a hotel is judged
as good or bad according to whether it will facilitate criminal behaviour.
There are other instances of dark humour when the narrator includes
useful tips on where to drown oneself best, for instance at the pool under
the Sandford lasher where there is an obelisk in memory of two men
who died there (cf. TMB 174).11 Also, the passage above serves as an
example for a characteristic of Jerome’s writing style: the paragraphs are
short, they end and begin abruptly and are not connected logically. The
narrator is jumping from thought to thought.
180 H. LIEDKE

The book’s presentation of “Thamesland,” a much cherished national

institution, is also problematic (from the point of view of the upper mid-
dle class). Three Men in a Boat is not reverential, but rather “matey” in
its approach to write about the Thames. Boating is not presented as a
refined activity but as an opportunity for joking around. The Thames is
not glorified or contrasted with other rivers in Europe but stylized as a
kind of playground for three friends. In his autobiography, Jerome even,
by way of understatement, writes that basically anyone could have writ-
ten the book and that “in 30,000 A.D. – if earth’s rivers still run – a
boat-load of Shaw’s ‘ancients’ will, in all probability, be repeating the
experiment with similar results, accompanied by a dog five thousand
years old” (Jerome 1926, 106).
Yet what some of the criticism of Jerome’s writing overlooks is that an
account does not have to be written in a grand style in order to be rever-
ential. It is unquestionable that the river had a special significance for the
writer for he lived most of his life in its neighbourhood, knew the sur-
rounding villages and lesser-known spots and also spent his honeymoon
in a little boat on it (cf. Fowkes 1977, 8). Boating, too, figures prom-
inently in the reminiscences of his childhood as the passage discussed
in the beginning of this chapter has shown. The tone he employs in his
travel book suggests that of a child eyeing its surroundings curiously,
and this is where the late-Romantic idler’s sensibility of seeing comes
into play. An implication inherent in Scheick’s claim about Jerome’s per-
ceived strangeness in a familiar terrain (cf. Scheick 2007, 408) is that J.
can only arrive at such a perception of his surroundings because through
idling, he has defamiliarized himself from them. As in the case of a recent
idler’s book, Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Jerome’s narra-
tor experiences places that he knows well as “outlandish” and sees “con-
tinents within counties” (Macfarlane 2012, 78). A central characteristic
of the Jeromian idler is thus that he is able and willing to strip himself of
previously held convictions and impressions.

WORK, PROGRESS AND (SENTIMENTAL) IDLENESS

IN THREE MEN IN A BOAT

On the level of content, Three Men in a Boat is an idler’s tale—a cel-

ebration of an “aimless excursion” (Fulford 2011, 94). In many ways,
it resembles “a twenty-first-century blog in its casual, intimate tone;
moment-to-moment level of detail; […] and ironic, almost snarky, atti-
tude” interspersed with J.’s “random commentary on other things”
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 181

(Byerly 2013, 112). The three protagonists are witty, somewhat noncha-
lant, but at the same time droll figures. Jerome’s notion of idling was,
and is also in Three Men in a Boat, “implicitly positioned against a life
of ‘working.’” In contrast to Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, Jerome’s idler
does not explore the modern city by foot but is “rather a figure momen-
tarily freed from work for a day or weekend who chooses to sit in front
of a fire with his male friends talking about a desultory range of general
topics, eschewing seriousness and treating all subjects lightly and humor-
ously” (Humpherys 2005, 6). The entire book is set on the premise “We
agree that we are overworked, and need rest” (TMB 7), thus from the
outset “work” is established against the negative pole at the end of the
“fun” and “nuisance” spectrum, not unlike it is done nowadays.
This playful attitude toward work was articulated both by Jerome “the
man” and Jerome “the writer,” blurring the lines between life and fiction
a bit more. Moss quotes Jerome’s secretary, who related how he did all
his writing by hand, and came up with most of his ideas while taking
long walks with his dog which he then dictated to his secretary prefera-
bly walking up and down in the room. Yet she also stated that he spent
the mornings “in fairly strenuous work” (Moss 1928, 198). Jerome,
however, commented on this work as follows:

The girl (secretary) becomes a sort of conscience; after a time you get
ashamed of yourself, muddling about the room and trying to look as if you
were thinking. She yawns, has pins and needles, begs your pardon every
five minutes – was under the impression that you said something. A girl
who knows her business can, without opening her mouth, bully a man into
working. (in Moss 1928, 199)

To work is to be bullied; it is repeatedly, albeit, of course, humorously,

referred to as a strenuous exercise. Its main purpose is to serve as a stark
and certainly unappealing contrast to delicious idleness. Thus, “J.” also
makes sure to detect work in all its shapes, even in the realm of boat-
ing. When the three friends are debating whose turn it would be to scull,
steer and do nothing, respectively, J. reacts in a slightly annoyed man-
ner—it is clear for him that it is definitely not his turn to do any physical
labour:

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. I love to keep it by me; the idea of get-
ting rid of it nearly breaks my heart. You cannot give me too much work;
182 H. LIEDKE

to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me; my study is so

full of it now that there is hardly an inch of room for [it] any more. I shall
have to throw out a wing soon. And I am careful of my work, too. Why,
some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for
years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride
in my work; I take it down now and then to dust it. No man keeps his
work in a better state of preservation than I do. But, though I crave for
work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.
(TMB 144–45)

What is implied in this passage and its personification (or, actually, objec-
tification: work is like a physical object that can be looked at and stored
away) of work is the idea that it should only be practised and, in fact,
thought about, in a clearly demarcated space and at a specific time. This
goes hand in hand with developments in the second half of the nine-
teenth century which brought about a clear division between work and
leisure time (cf. Thompson 1967).
Conversely, of course, and perhaps more importantly, the idler here
also allots a specific space and stretch of time to practise his idleness.
While he is on the boat, he does not want to be confronted with work,
which belongs to a different space. Thus, in setting the group’s actions
in opposition to work as the more permanent mode of their lives, the
focus is very much on the boat trip, no matter how enjoyable it may be,
as a temporary activity that is defined through its clear temporal limita-
tions. For creative writers, idle travel precisely “gains its pleasure from
being a temporary niche in everyday life” that is “tied back to […] life”
(Korte 2014, 228).
While Jerome writes as a humourist, one that is “funful” and “sun-ful,”
there is also a clear-sighted and sorrowful quality in Three Men in Boat (cf.
Kernahan 1928, 36–37). There are passages that articulate ennui and a
critique of modern civilization and progress, a sentimental mourning for
a time where life was simpler and less perverted by objects and alleged
“things of comfort”; significantly, it is objects like the alarm clock at the
beginning of the text, tins of fruit and oil stoves which complicate rather
than simplify their journey (cf. Fowkes 1977, 9). What follows from this
mindset are diverse musings that explicitly critique modern times:

George said why could not we be always like this – away from the world,
with its sins and temptation, leading sober, peaceful lives, and doing
good. I said it was the sort of thing I had often longed for myself; and
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 183

we discussed the possibility of our going away, we four, to some handy,

well-fitted desert island, and living there in the woods. Harris said that the
danger about desert islands, as far as he had heard, was that they were so
damp; but George said no, not if properly drained. And then we got on to
drains, and that put George in mind of a very funny thing that had hap-
pened to his father once. (TMB 94)

This passage is a good example for a successful balancing of genuine

yearning with a snippet of irony employed at the very moment in which
the former is about to tip over into brutal sentimentality. The four (that
means that the dog is also participating in the discussion) imagine a “life
in the woods,” and the thought that woods are damp leads the brain-
storming in a completely different direction, they start to ramble. The
ensuing anecdote George renders changes the tone of the scene com-
pletely to a bit of “light reading” (Gutch 1979, 227). It is important to
note, however, that these ironic checks are not the conclusion to every
musing, quite on the contrary: Gutch is quite right in saying that some
passages are so “drifting” that they become “lost to sight for minutes at a
time” (Gutch 1979, 227). Indeed, passages such as the following on “the
night” are extremely self-conscious and also the reason why Jerome has
occasionally been referred to as a writer of “purple prose.” This kind of
prose is “the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable,
not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add
to it by showing – showing off – the expansive power of the mind itself”
because we “have to be awakened with something almost intolerably
vivid” as Paul West puts it, in an adequately purple way (cf. West 1985,
n.p.). J. intensifies his impressions of a night on the bank of the river:

The boat seemed stuffy, and my head ached; so I thought I would step out
into the cool night-air. I slipped on what clothes I could find about […]
and crept under the canvas on to the bank. It was a glorious night. The
moon had sunk and left the quiet earth alone with the stars. It seemed as
if, in the silence and the hush, while we her children slept, they were talk-
ing with her, their sister – conversing of mighty mysteries in voices too vast
and deep for childish human ears to catch the sound. They awe us, these
strange stars, so cold, so clear. We are as children whose small feet have
strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they have been taught to wor-
ship but know not; and, standing where the echoing dome spans the long
vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half hoping, half afraid to see some
awful vision hovering there.
184 H. LIEDKE

And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great
presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so
full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter
thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night,
like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head,
and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and, though
she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed
cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone. (TMB 96)

Characterized by sentimental hyperbole—“these strange stars, so cold, so

clear”—the passage is especially “dense” on the level of content because
the narrator makes the readers complicit in an act of enforced rejuvena-
tion; it is not the fact that people are all humans that unites them but
that they are “children whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit
temple of god” and who snuggle up with their flushed cheek against
Night’s bosom. What Jerome evokes here is both a vision of a collective
yearning for an eternal childhood and also a celebration of the magic of
the normally unseen. The solitary “I” that begins the passage is quickly
superseded by a “we” because under the influence of the stars a com-
munity comes into life; the first person plural adds a “gravitas of tone
in the commentator” and is a strategy that was already employed by
Jerome in Stage-Land (Batts 2000, 96). West’s comment about purple
prose, namely that “[w]hen the deep purple blooms, you are looking
at a dimension, not a posy” (West 1985, n.p.), also applies to Jerome.
What follows in the above excerpt is a story from ancient times about a
group of knights, one of whom got lost in the woods; when he thought
he would die, a “stately maiden” led him into the light, out of the for-
est of “Sorrow”—in other words, a digression within a digression. Moss
refers to this passage, among others, in order to justify his calling Jerome
a serious writer (cf. Moss 1928, 168). It is also striking that the pensive,
sentimental style used in the passage is very similar to Jerome’s private
writing, for instance in My Life and Times, suggesting that he actually
was serious about his observations and not ironic.12 Yet leaving aside his
intentions, one can look at what the text is doing, and it is decidedly pur-
ple and “over-written” (Fowkes 1977, 8), containing too many lines that
are merely there because they earned their author an additional penny.
Ironically, therefore, those passages that most clearly resemble work on a
formal level—line added to line, each adding a “pling” to the cash regis-
ter—are most far away from work representing instances of sentimental,
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 185

introspective idleness. Of course, when it comes to representations of idle

moments, the capturing of these necessarily is work (this also becomes
obvious in Anna Mary Howitt’s meticulous descriptions of churches and
art-works, see Chapter 7), a mental exercise, while only the experience
itself can have been free from any of these factors.

PHYSICALITY AND (SLOW) TRAVEL

While boating itself was already a slow mode of travel, there were other
slow spatial practices which Jerome enjoyed and wrote about. A feature
that puts Jerome in the same tradition with other (late) Victorian idlers
such as R. L. Stevenson, George Borrow13 and Margaret Fountaine (see
next chapter), and also makes him anticipate modern-day idlers such
as Tom Hodgkinson and Robert Macfarlane, is his interest in “archaic
modes of travel” and his praise of spontaneous unmotorized idling.
Much like the other three abovementioned Victorians, he valorizes care-
free (or, more precisely, “weight free”) travelling over other modern
travel modes and prefers a journey that is not timed or hurried, echoing
the remarks in Basil Montagu’s Railroad Eclogues (cf. Part I, Chapter 4,
section “Why Guidebooks Are Like Goggles”):

A knapsack on one’s back and a stout staff in one’s hand makes joyous
travelling. Your modern motor-car, rushing through history in a cloud of
dust, is for Time’s rich slaves. Even on the old push bicycle one is too much
in a hurry. One sees the beauty after one has passed. One wonders: shall
one get off and go back? Meanwhile, one goes on: it is too late. On foot,
one leans one’s arms upon the gate: the picture has time to print itself upon
the memory. One falls into talk with cheery tinker, brother tramp, or village
priest. The pleasant byway lures our willing feet: it may lead to mystery,
adventure. (Jerome 1926, 108, emphases added)

The decision to walk by foot may lead to mystery, but this is not definite.
Yet it is precisely this possibility the walker embraces and finds valuable.
The walker also puts himself in alliance with the tramp. Similarly to the
articles discussed in Part I, Chapter 3, section “Sight-Seeing vs. Seeing”,
from Cycling and The Leisure Hour, the travel mode of those constantly on
the road—tramps in the former and gypsies in the latter—receives a valor-
ization as the most independent and self-sufficient way of travelling that
does not need a lot of extra equipment, even though this was available and
186 H. LIEDKE

in vogue at that time. Unburdened by objects, one can take one’s time
to observe and look long enough so that the “picture has time to print
itself upon the memory”; a glimpse caught from a window train would
not be sufficient to leave any lasting impression. Minshull mentions the
terms “gypsy,” “tramp” and “Sunday rambler” in the same breath, which
is another argument in favour of the logical and semantic link between
the terms in the context of nature walking (cf. Minshull 2014, xviii). The
country hiker “is one who leaps and skelps and swings to a destination”
(ibid.). In Three Men in a Boat, too, a connection is established between
the speed of one’s journey and the ways in which it allows one to make a
halt and look—the slower one is travelling, the more easily observations
can be made, and one does not become Time’s slave.
Another parallel to a “gypsy” style of travelling is J.’s description of
whether the three friends should go camping or not14:

Should we “camp out” or sleep at inns? George and I were for camping
out. We said it would be so wild and free, so patriarchal like. […] Then we
run our little boat into some quiet nook, and the tent is pitched, and the
frugal supper cooked and eaten. Then the big pipes are filled and lighted,
and the pleasant chat goes round in musical undertone; while, in the
pauses of our talk, the river, playing round the boat, prattles strange old
tales and secrets, sings low the old child’s song that it has sung so many
thousand years […] – a song that we, who have learnt to love its changing
face, who have so often nestled on its yielding bosom, think, somehow, we
understand, though we could not tell you in mere words the story that we
listen to.
And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops
down to kiss it with a sister’s kiss, and throws her silver arms around it
clingingly; and we watch it as it flows, ever singing, ever whispering, out to
meet its king, the sea – till our voices die away in silence, and the pipes go
out – till we, common-place, everyday young men enough, feel strangely
full of thoughts, half sad, half sweet, and do not care or want to speak […]
Harris said: “How about when it rained?”
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris – no wild
yearning for the unattainable. (TMB 17–18, emphases added)

Apart from a valorization of a style of living that is not sedentary, what is

noteworthy about this passage on the level of style is that the syntax of
the narration mirrors the movement of the river because it mainly con-
sists of two long run-on sentences. It is not the thoughts of the three
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 187

men that are projected onto their environment, but the flowing and the
“kiss” of the river fill them so that they are “strangely full of thoughts.”
The idea here is that the travellers lose their sense of being subjects and
are tossed around by the surrounding nature, even their thinking does
not belong to them any more. This feeling of a defamiliarization from
their selves is summed up as inducing them to have a “wild yearning
for the unattainable,” thus the idea that they cannot stop themselves
from wanting to attain something (a certain state of mind or realiza-
tion) they know they will never attain. This is somewhat cryptic, yet
the general impression invites reminiscences to notions of the sublime
as presented in the early nineteenth century since it is nature and, more
specifically, the magnificence of the river that triggers these emotions of
awe. Awe itself is also a form of idleness in the sense that, as J. writes,
the three men experiencing it are so full of thoughts that they “do not
care or want to speak”; they are transported into a state of paralysis
that lets them forget they can actually be the agents of their own think-
ing. Instead, they are in a state of “oneness with Nature” which their
excursion has earned them, along with a feeling of freedom that links
Jerome to other committed nature walkers such as William Wordsworth
and George Borrow (cf. Minshull 2014, xvi). While Minshull contrasts
these nature walkers with urban walkers, I see Jerome as a hybrid walker,
combining qualities and desires of the two because he, apart from experi-
encing these moments of oneness with nature, is throughout his writing
as self-aware (or self-conscious) and easily distracted (why else the many
digressions?) as the urban walker.
As far as the complex of physicality and idleness is concerned, one
can observe several instances of moments of idleness that materialize as a
consequence of repetitive movement, that is moments of “flow.” During
their boat trip, all possible kinds of moving about on a river are men-
tioned: boating, steering, skimming, punting and pulling. When J. is
pulling, he proudly remarks that he is doing so “splendidly” and, pull-
ing with his whole body, gets into a “steady rhythmical swing” which
he perceives as pleasant (TMB 76). In another scene, J. talks about his
emotions when sailing and compares them to what he thinks it would
feel like to be flying:

I steered. There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It

comes as near to flying as man has got to yet – except in dreams. The
wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not
188 H. LIEDKE

where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping
tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throb-
bing against hers! (118)

Notably, when the verb “to steer” is mentioned the second time, it is
used in the progressive form, that is “I steered” becomes “I was steer-
ing”, suggesting that the flowing movement of the boat and the river
leaves an impact on the physical activity of the narrator—his actions
become continuous and merge with the continuous movement of the
river. He sums this experience up as “an hour of deep enchantment,
of ecstatic hope and longing” (119). The Thames, thus, functions as a
space between being and becoming which is there to be occupied by the
subject; J. gives the Thames a melancholy meaning through his idle gaze.

TOO MUCH OF AN IDLER TO BE ORIGINAL?

JEROME AND DICKENS JR.’S DICTIONARY OF THE THAMES
In the remainder of this case study, I will focus on the idleness inherent
in Jerome’s text and its structure. This is a continuation of an observa-
tion I made above about the drifting structure of Three Men in a Boat
and the idea that while most passages indeed will have served (and still
serve) as light reading because of their entertaining and anecdotal qual-
ity, the text itself is also light. One can link this to the question what
the positive and negative implications are if a book is “over-written.” By
stripping the text of its “mere” jest, one can arrive at an assessment of
the dimensions of Jerome’s concept of idleness in his travel book. While
Jerome and his writing are undoubtedly humorous and are supposed to
be light and merry, and J. and his friends relish in stylizing themselves
as members of the “idlers club,” there is also another level of meaning.
Idleness in Three Men in a Boat encompasses a state of mind in which the
individual finds him or herself longing for something which can never
be attained; it takes place in a sphere of constant deferral. For a book
to be “over-written” can also mean, put more positively, that it is over-
flowing and rich because the idleness its author is experiencing at a given
moment is enabling him to articulate his feelings in a lush manner.
Even though the book has never gone out of print since it was pub-
lished (and is also included in The Guardian’s 100 best books of all
time),15 it was met with scathing reviews at the time of its publication,16
and one notices “a polarization between hostility from the English middle
classes, and encouragement by the general readership” (Batts 2000, 108).
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 189

This hostility ignored the fact that some claimed that the book had
“done more to popularize the Thames than dozens of guide books on
the crystal stream” (Field 1894, 569). It is the very term “popularizing,”
however, which encapsulates the root of the problem. The review in the
Saturday Review was shattering (“[i]t is not a piece of fiction,” [“Three
Men in a Boat” 1889, 387]) and the reviewer decided to consider it as
“documents” and nothing else—a hint at the book’s unsettling generic
ambiguity. He then went on to condemn it both in terms of style (“col-
loquial clerk’s English of the year 1889”, [ibid.]) and content, for it was
an “amazingly real” reflection of lower middle-class English life which,
according to the reviewer, was narrow and poor (ibid., 388). Its only use
would be to those studying late Victorian slang in the future who want
to understand “the world of idle youth” of that time (ibid.). The tone in
reviews by contemporary critics and other literary writers (Oscar Wilde
called Jerome “unreadable,” cf. Batts 2000, 91), indicated that “accord-
ing to dominant critical discourse, the popular cultural tradition to which
Jerome and his readership were considered as belonging was still con-
sidered infra dig” (Pickford 2007, 85). This was despite the fact that,
because of his position as editor, he had a successful network of estab-
lished middlebrow authors of that time, such as Arthur Conan Doyle,
Rudyard Kipling, George Bernhard Shaw and Mark Twain (even though
Twain and Jerome probably did not meet in person, cf. Batts 2000,
92). It was the similarity to Twain, however, which made English mid-
dle-class readers, “loyal to traditional English humour” feel ambivalent
about Jerome (Batts 2000, 92). The British writer Israel Zangwill even
suspected that “much of the animosity was simply down to Jerome’s suc-
cess” (Pickford 2007, 86).
Jerome’s text is not merely light for lightness’s sake; I want to claim
that he employs humoristic idleness as a method to make the awareness
of life’s brevity less present. The fact of this brevity cannot be done away
with. Yet in Jerome’s text it is dissected and suspended by being depicted
in a humoristic manner and humanized in such a way that the awareness
of life’s brevity casts aside its weight and is incorporated in a quotidian
context. The following example will illustrate this idea. In the passage, J.
describes how he once went towing with two girls:

Of all experiences in connexion with towing, the most exciting is being

towed by girls. It is a sensation that nobody ought to miss. It take [sic]
two girls to tow always; two hold the rope, and the other one runs round
and round and giggles. They generally begin by getting themselves tied
190 H. LIEDKE

up. They get the line round their legs, and have to sit down on the path
and undo each other, and then they twist it round their necks, and are
nearly strangled. They fix it straight, however, at last, and start off at a run,
pulling the boat along at quite a dangerous pace. At the end of a hundred
yards they are naturally breathless, and suddenly stop, and all sit down
on the grass and laugh, and your boat drifts out to midstream and turns
round, before you know what has happened, or can get hold of a scull.
Then they stand up, and are surprised. (TMB 84)

While Batts would refer to passages such as the above as a description

of action that reveals “Jerome’s predilection for broad slapstick” (Batts
2000, 107), I want to argue that what is happening in this brief excerpt
is a dissection and expansion of a moment, a quick succession of actions,
quite similar to the effect of Anna Mary Howitt’s imaginary bubbles.
But whereas she is creating them out of stationary scenes and “pictures,”
Jerome is repeatedly stretching out actions as if to strip them of their
momentariness and insignificance. On the one hand, this could be a par-
ody of realist fiction and Victorian guidebooks in their hunt for com-
pleteness and accuracy, but it is at the same time a praise of the normally
unobserved, of those by-products of people’s daily actions that are done
automatically rather than consciously. In the description of the towing
trip, none of the actions is privileged over the other—both the holding
of the rope (actually important) and the getting tied up in it (not desira-
ble) are given the same space in the text.
When “J.” remembers a rowing trip with his cousin, during the
course of which they got lost and “not a ghost of a lock was to be seen”
(TMB 87) for a mile, he records how they both panicked and tried to
cover up their uneasiness by starting to ask each other whether the other
one thought they were in a dream—the simple questions “Where were
we? What had happened to us?” (87) suddenly attained a note of actual
disorientation and ontological value. When the anecdote ends, however,
with their safely finding their way home right in time for supper, it is
evident that Jerome distances himself ironically from actual moments of
disorientation and comments on the ridiculous situation. The scene is
unsettling because Jerome employs shilling-shocker effects from popular
sensational stories of the time involving murder and adventure (which
makes Scheick also draw a connection to the book’s parallels to other
“stranger-in-a-strange-land adventure plot[s] typical of imperial narra-
tives,” [Scheick 2007, 410]). Kernahan, the copy-editor of Oscar Wilde’s
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 191

1891 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray and an acquaintance of

Jerome’s (an amusing fact in light of the scornful remarks Wilde made
about Jerome), presents a somewhat lengthy account of what he thinks is
central to the writer’s humour and concludes by comparing it to

the prism-glass by which the seemingly white ray, of what we call life, is
resolved into its varying and component colours? If, at the edge of the
ray, the humorist sees a banding of gay and happy gold, the banding
of humour – he sees also, at the other edge, a banding of the violet or
the purple which have been chosen as the colour-symbol of sadness and
mourning, and so he sees life sorrowfully, as well as sun-fully and funfully.
(Kernahan 1928, 36–37)

Reading the passages above in this light, I want to claim, therefore, that
the seeming digressions and detours in the realm of shilling-shockers or
imperial narratives are not merely there to entertain on a level of con-
tent. Rather, Jerome, as the humourist, in his writing expands the brevity
of the moments that make up life by stretching out successions of brief
moments into seemingly much longer stretches of time, thus providing
insignificance with momentum, turning brevity into something not as
devastating.
A second facet that is central when speaking about the lightness of
Jerome’s text is its refraining from repeating well-known facts or men-
tioning them in a way that seems very awkward. A certain sense of disap-
pointment underlies the text; while the disappointment with modernity
on a general level has already been discussed, there is also a disappoint-
ment with the fact that many sights have been looked at too much
already. Thus, Iffley lock is underwhelming when compared to the pic-
tures J. has seen of it and in fact “[f]ew things […] come quite up to
the pictures of them, in this world” (TMB 174). Charles Dickens, Jr.,
in his Dictionary of the Thames makes a very similar comment about
the mill, even saying that it is “hardly necessary to visit Iffley to see the
mill” because it “has been painted in every kind of medium, and photo-
graphed in every sort of camera, till it must be as familiar to most peo-
ple as Windsor Castle itself” (Dickens 1888, 112–13). Both Jerome and
Dickens present Iffley Lock as having been looked at until it appears
insignificant and the many pictures and reproductions of it have stripped
it of its original charm. This identifies both writers as late-Romantic
idlers: they have a specific sensibility of seeing which makes them want
192 H. LIEDKE

to see things differently and not as the tourism industry and new techno-
logical innovations tell them to. With regard to Jerome in particular, the
remark about the camera is crucial and supports the claim that Jerome’s
disappointment with the abundance of pictures also applies to that of
words: if certain phrases, depictions and historical facts constantly repeat
themselves, it becomes much more interesting to look at the things that
are unmentioned and unknown and the pauses in between well-known
utterances. Examining a couple of instances which present revaluations
of idle, light writing one sees that—in comparison with historic facts and
descriptions that can or cannot mean anything or nothing—emotional,
personal writing is the one type of writing that passes the contest of
significance. Such descriptions, however, may be unsettling to contem-
porary readers because they address a blank and do not adorn (cf. my
previously addressed idea of a Victorian horror vacui in Part I, Chapter 4,
section “Why Guidebooks Are Like Goggles”).
There are several historical digressions that J. usually introduces as
musing fits (cf. TMB 49). They lack originality and emulate the style and
information from Dickens’s handbook in a rather obvious manner. For
instance, when the idlers see the streets of Kingston from their boat in
the sunlight, this and Harris’ sculling have such a lulling effect on J. that
he starts musing on how the town must have been in times past

when Saxon ‘kinges’ were crowned there. Great Caesar crossed the river
there, and the Roman legions camped upon its sloping uplands. Caesar,
like, in later years, Elizabeth, seems to have stopped everywhere: only he
was more respectable than good Queen Bess; he didn’t put up at the pub-
lic-houses. (TMB 49)

J. then rambles on about how Queen Elizabeth I. visited all pubs in the
vicinity of London and makes many other random humorous remarks
about kings, queens and drunkenness. As Watts notes, there are “[r]
esemblances in the ordering of the materials, in the salient features
selected, and in the phrasing” that “confirm that the similarities between
Jerome’s accounts and Dickens’s are not merely coincidental but are a
matter of derivation” (Watts 2012, 405). Before drawing possible con-
clusions from this (something Watts does not do, albeit his comparisons
are very insightful), I want to illustrate those similarities by pointing
out two descriptions of two places by Jerome and Dickens, respectively.
The above passage on Kingston, for instance, where J. is lulled into a
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 193

supposedly spontaneous and associative musing fit, turns out not to be

so original after all. All the historic figures and events he muses about are
introduced by Dickens in his handbook, even in the same order. Dickens
starts with the “ubiquitous Caesar” (cf. Dickens 1888, 117) and then
continues with the stories of Anglo-Saxon kings that in his account are
even more dramatic than Jerome’s anecdotes. In comparison, Dickens’s
entry is much more detailed and entertaining to read. A second exam-
ple is Jerome’s rendering of Walton. The historical digression inspired
by this place includes comments about Caesar’s, Queen Elizabeth’s,
Cromwell’s and Bradshaw’s connections to it (one humorous com-
ment clarifying that the Bradshaw in question is the politician from
King Charles’s times and not the author of guidebooks is dripping with
the zeitgeist of the travel book’s publication), in that order (cf. TMB
76–77). Now Dickens’s entry on “Walton” reads as follows:

[St. George’s Hill] is the site of one of the innumerable camps of Caesar,
traces of which are still visible, and it is believed by those competent to
form an opinion that a still greater camp existed at Oatlands. From St.
George’s Hill may be obtained one of the finest views on the river, extend-
ing over seven counties. The village, with its long straggling Highstreet,
and, at right angles to it, Churchstreet, still retains an air of primitive sim-
plicity. Here was the residence of the regicide Bradshaw, and not far off,
at Ashley Park, the Lord Protector himself is said to have resided. Local
tradition, never slow to minister to local self-importance, holds it an article
of firm belief that in Bradshaw’s house the signatures were affixed to the
death-warrant of Charles. (Dickens 1888, 280)

There is also a comment about how Queen Elizabeth went stag-hunting

in Oatlands Park. While there is not much room for creativity when it
comes to street names and geographical descriptions, Jerome does not
even change the order in which Dickens presented historical personages
who had a connection with Walton—another instance for derivation, as
Watts rightly observes.
Why would a writer like Jerome put so little effort into hiding that
he copied from Dickens’s handbook? As a way to pay homage, this
would seem out of place because, surprisingly enough, the handbook is
not mentioned in the text. Admittedly, one can ask whether history is
the appropriate testing ground for creativity: Certain people are associ-
ated with certain places, and why should an author not consult another
194 H. LIEDKE

author’s thoughts on that matter? But on the other hand, there are
numerous approaches how to present history, how to clad it in a new
attire without altering the basic content. In this regard, Jerome fails mis-
erably; he, in fact, plagiarizes Dickens by copying what he classifies as
interesting bits of information and foci. When one is familiar with the
original handbooks, thus, the historical additions appear even more out
of place in the otherwise whimsically personal narrative: they are highly
unmotivated, as it would be highly simplistic to copy entries from a dic-
tionary in any other paper or literary work. They are the products of an
idler in the negative sense, one who was too lazy to put some work into
digging up new facts about a place he visited and decided to stick to
what had already been said about it.
One is reminded of another late Victorian writer who was accused of
plagiarism during his lifetime, namely Oscar Wilde, who lazily refused
“to replace the shorthand of quotation by a carefully thought-out phras-
ing of his own” and who accordingly “shocked” some readers with
this “effrontery of a would-be literary imposter” (Gardner 1982, 52).
Wilde’s retort to accusations like these was to say that an artist “is not an
isolated fact, he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entou-
rage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of
beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a this-
tle” (Wilde 1885, 2). Jerome’s comment on the veracity of his narration
and the material used is similar to Wilde’s stance in its off-handedness:
he even admits that he had to work in “a dozen or so slabs of history”
into each chapter by “grim determination” when he realized that the
book he was writing contained too much “humorous relief” (Jerome
1926, 103). There is indeed something grim about the digressions, as
if their author did not particularly want them to be there (and appar-
ently there were even more of those because Jerome remembers how
F. W. Robinson, the publisher of Home Chimes in which the book first
appeared serially, slung most of them out, [cf. Jerome 1926, 103]).
Jerome’s initial frustration with writing the book, originally intended
as A Story of the Thames, might have also stemmed from the fact that
he was facing a difficult task. He could assume that many of his readers
had picked up his book because they wanted to hear something about
river Thames travel, apart from wanting to be entertained; he knew he
could not tell them anything new and many of them would have been
familiar with Dickens’s handbook. Phrasing these historio-geographical
digressions very similarly to Dickens’s descriptions from the outset, the
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 195

effect could have been that those readers simply skipped the passages and
continued with the personal ones, that is with those passages that were
truly Jeromian and which he had written because he wanted to and not
because he felt they should be included.
In those cases, where Dickens himself refers to other authors or
sources (at least he mentions their names/titles explicitly), one stumbles
on a Derridian minefield of contaminated text: meaning (here histor-
ical meaning) is constantly deferred, and it suddenly becomes unstable
and instead of adding reassuring information to a jolly chain of events
makes one turn to the purportedly insignificant, “light” passages for sig-
nificance. All of a sudden, the personal provides more stability than the
factual.
In the light of this, idle writing undergoes a process of revaluation.
Jerome’s historical digressions are there for the sole purpose not to be
there: they are the lightest writing imaginable and force the reader to
turn to those idle and jesting passages that provide at least momen-
tary reassurance. When one has finished reading the book, one will find
oneself longing for this light idleness and a land of strange names and
places. This playful- or even carelessness in Jerome’s work provides a
contrast to the other case studies and at the same time more easily evokes
the stereotype of the witty idler à la Samuel Johnson or the dandy à la
Oscar Wilde. Yet what is more, Jerome’s take adds a fresh dimension
to an understanding of idleness in the context of travel by making vis-
ible the close interplay between text, perception of space and the role
of physicality. This prepares the way for the next case study, Margaret
Fountaine, whose pleasurably experienced idleness precisely comes into
being through a physical form of it, namely butterflying.

NOTES
1. Klapka wrote his Memoirs of the War of Independence in Hungary, pub-
lished in 1850, at their house.
2. He rejected his friends’ and relatives’ offers of help because he did not
want to be patronized or pitied, which makes Moss compare him to Dr.
Johnson at Oxford (Moss 1928, 70).
3. Jerome’s novel Paul Kelver (1902), which tells of a lower middle-class
boy from East London who becomes famous, is partly autobiographical.
4. Barr’s and Jerome’s The Idler was partly inspired by Samuel Johnson’s
series of 103 essays, which appeared between 1758–1760 and was also
196 H. LIEDKE

entitled The Idler and which in turn inspired Tom Hodgkinson (see my
remarks in the introduction to this book).
5. In William Morris’s utopian fantasy News from Nowhere, the Thames also
provides a sense of travel through history. Yet even though it is suppos-
edly a journey to Nowhere, Buzard has pointed out that this Nowhere
is contrasted with the “particularized utopian terrain” demarcated by
Morris’s houses in Hammersmith and Oxfordshire. The novel presents
a “temporary refuge” for the narrator (Buzard 1997, 452), much like
Jerome’s trip is from the beginning limited to a stretch of time.
6. Foucault’s essay, here in a translation, based on a lecture he gave in March
1967, ends with the wonderfully evocative statement: “In civilizations
without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure,
and the police take the place of pirates” (Foucault 1986, 27).
7. In the fourth issue of Hodgkinson’s The Idler from April to May 1994,
there is a reference to Jerome’s book in a column on idle pleasures. The
author (who is unspecified) writes: “There can be no better way to drift
off into peaceful reveries than lying in a drifting boat, occasionally (sic)
opening one’s eyes to see a patch of sky, a cloud, slow-moving treetops.
Like so many idle pleasures, boating is always a way to legitimise doing
nothing. There is plenty to occupy oneself with – locks, preparing food,
turning the steering wheel – but in reality you are doing nothing of any
use to anyone. Which is wonderful. Boating doesn’t get you anywhere
– it would always be quicker by car. The pleasure lies in the moment”
(“Idle Pleasures” 1994, 8).
8. In The Thames Guide Book, the vocabulary is in fact even more pomp-
ous, when one reads sentences as the following: “The flowing Rhine, the
mighty Danube, and the winding Seine, have been sung in song more
often than the Thames; each boasts of scenery more striking and more
grand; but their united popularity is as nothing compared to our ‘king of
island rivers’” (Harrison 1890, vii–viii).
9. The trip also features prominently in Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames,
p. 253ff., which I will comment upon in more detail in the following. All
references are to the edition from 1888.
10. In the following, I will use the abbreviation TMB when referring to pas-
sages from the 1979 edition of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.
To Say Nothing of the Dog! (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
11. Dickens puts the focus very differently and informs his readers about
when pike, perch and roach, respectively, can be best fished (Dickens
1888, 222); however, in the section “Trip from Oxford to London,” he
also writes: “The pools at Sandford Lasher are very dangerous for bath-
ing, and the obelisk that stands on the bank should warn bathers to avoid
the spot” (261).
 9 JEROME K. JEROME’S HUMORISTIC IDLENESS … 197

12. See, for instance, the passage on his philosophy of work (Jerome 1926, 302).
13. See Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers” (1877) and especially his Travels
with a Donkey (1903); see also Korte (2014). George Borrow (1865)
wrote about his experiences hiking through Wales from North to South
in the travelogue Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery (London:
John Murray).
14. The author of The Thames Guide Book is unequivocally in favour of camp-
ing out (Harrison 1906, 130).
15. Pickford points out that in “recent years, Jerome has enjoyed a minor crit-
ical renaissance and Three Men in a Boat is now available in both Penguin
Classics and Oxford’s World Classics, thus gaining respectable classic sta-
tus” (Pickford 2007, 84).
16. It was first published in serial form in Home Chimes but this was not
successful.

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