The fin-de-siècle was a period of literary and aesthetic change in which artists rebelled against the strict, oppressive Victorian sensibilities of the nineteenth century in anticipation of the twentieth. From the projects and experiments in this period arose modernism, an artistic period still defining contemporary movements. Strictly speaking, fin-de-siècle refers to the 1890s, but as with any artistic movement, it need not be confined to that time alone. Indeed, many works of literature from the 1880s or even earlier fit best beside works of the 1890s; for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) fits best alongside such works as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91), and H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897). Therefore, it seems only fitting to discuss and evaluate the current topic, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) (1889), within the same literary milieu. Indeed, it perhaps would not fit alongside earlier comic novels from the century; it has little in common with a Dickens novel. It is unquestionably a product of the fin-de-siècle.
For those unfamiliar with the term fin-de-siècle, a brief description will be helpful. The period was marked by anxiety, even paranoia, over the century’s end (fin-de-siècle is literally French for “end of the century”). However, some artists were more optimistic, anticipating a sort of revolution in the coming period. In hindsight, with the coming of the World Wars, the rise of modernism, and the beginnings of a global economic infrastructure, both camps were correct. Either way, they expressed their anxieties or excitement through their writing, and they were able to do so unlike ever before thanks to Oscar Wilde’s efforts to promote l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake,” encouraging artists to produce art for no other reason than art’s intrinsic beauty and value. Suddenly, a writer need not justify his or her work within a social rubric, allowing an explosion of generic development.
Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) is an excellent example of a novel advancing this generic development. It is hard to accurately classify this work; part travelogue, part autobiography, part fiction, part Menippean satire, part historical narrative, it defies any attempt to be classified. But its individual elements can be broken down, analyzed, and understood in order to evaluate this text two ways: based on its overall literary merit and historical importance, and based on its timelessness and entertaining power regardless of its historical situation.
Considered as a work of the fin-de-siècle, this novel perfectly expresses many of the concerns of the period. It begins with the three friends and the dog discussing their poor health: “There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course” (Jerome 7). This opening scene of friends lounging about, smoking and chatting, casts a slightly decadent mood over the text from the start which Jerome sustains throughout. This group is one of idle pleasure-seekers. Their comparisons of ill health, however, is a reminder of the unfounded paranoia of the age; the narrator, J., finds out when he goes to the doctors that he in fact is in perfect health, despite his own belief that “the only malady . . . I had not got was housemaid’s knee” (8). So, they decide to escape their fabricated woes in pursuit of the pleasures of a two-week journey down the Thames River.
Although the book is actually linear and a bit picaresque, it is highly digressive and mostly a chronicle of associative musings. Events that take place along the river trigger someone’s memory of a similar tale, leading to the recounting of anecdotes and “stretchers” in a style similar to the associative stream-of-consciousness technique Joyce would perfect in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, but also harking back to such earlier writers as Laurence Sterne. Indeed, one could easily see Jerome’s text as a bridge between the two writers.
The following are some brief examples of Jerome’s finest moments. His critique of weather forecasters is clever and timeless: “I do think that of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness by which we are plagued, this ‘weather-forecast’ fraud is about the most aggravating. It ‘forecasts’ precisely what happened yesterday or the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen today” (42). When the group tries in vain to open a tin of pineapple, the comic frustration is slapstick, yet utterly human: “There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead” (117). Jerome is at his best in Chapter 17, whose main focus is “the art of angling” (161). The group stops at an inn and sees a great trout mounted and kept behind glass. The locals each take turns describing its capture. Everyone has his own unique story of how much the fish weighed, how he caught it, and how his conquest is the pride of the community. Before the night ends, the group have heard so many different men boast of their having caught the fish that they truly have no idea who the true champion is. The chapter’s climax brilliantly answers the question:
It really was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it, the more we marvelled at it.
It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view of it.
And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George and the chair on top of it.
‘You haven’t injured the fish, have you?’ I cried in alarm, rushing up.
‘I hope not,’ said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
But he had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments—I say a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred. I did not count them.
We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up into little pieces like that.
And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a stuffed trout, but it was not.
That trout was plaster of Paris. (168-69)
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) is loaded with short comic scenes such as this one, the comedy not a bit dated, the writing direct, refreshingly readable. Overall, the contemporary reader will find this book to be a pleasurable, quick, easy read. Some parts are a bit dated, but the language never alienates or challenges. It can be enjoyed both as a key example of fin-de-siècle, pre-modernist literature or simply as a casual read for the less literary inclined. Doubtless, it will make you laugh.
Sources
Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!). Baltimore: Penguin, 1962.
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