Jerome K. Jerome - Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome

Table of Contents

The Complete Works of

JEROME K. JEROME

(1859-1927)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2014

Version 1

The Complete Works of

JEROME K. JEROME

By Delphi Classics, 2014

The Novels

Belsize House, Caldmore Jeromes birthplace

Jerome, aged 2 in 1861, with his mother Marguerite

THREE MEN IN A BOAT (TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG)

This classic comic novel was first published in 1889 and forms an account of a boating holiday on the Thames, taken by the narrator, his two friends and their dog. The narrative relates the various comic scrapes that beset them, interlaced with numerous comic digressions on various trivial topics, such as picture hanging and the opening of tinned food.

Each of the three men are based on real people the narrator, J., is a version of Jerome himself, while his friends George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel make up the rest of the fictive party. The dog, Montmorency, was Jeromes invention. The book is also partly based on Jeromes honeymoon with his wife, Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris (Ettie), when they had undertaken a boating tour on the Thames.

The novel was initially intended to be a travel guide, but the humorous content that gradually crept into Jeromes project finally edged out any serious intention. Elements of the original format survive, however, in the inclusion of sentimental passages of description.

Upon its original publication, the novel was badly received by critics, largely due to snobbery at Jeromes lower middle-class upbringing, his self-education and his use of slang phrases. Despite this hostile reaction, the book sold so well that it allowed Jerome the financial security to become a full-time writer.

The first edition

Title page of the first edition

Jeromes wife Ettie, whom he married shortly before writing his first comic novel, which is based on the couples honeymoon experiences in a little boat on the Thames

CONTENTS

The River Thames at Kingston the object of the Three Mens journey

The plaque at 91-104 Chelsea Gardens, the block where Jerome lived whilst writing Three Men in a Boat

The building today

PREFACE.

The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style , or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys , as in its simple truthfulness . Its pages form the record of events that really happened . All that has been done is to colour them ; and , for this , no extra charge has been made . George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals , but things of flesh and blood especially George , who weighs about twelve stone . Other works may excel this in dept of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size ; but , for hopeless and incurable veracity , nothing yet discovered can surpass it . This , more than all its other charms , will , it is felt , make the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader ; and will lend additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches .

London, August , 1889.

CHAPTER I.

Three invalids. Sufferings of George and Harris. A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies. Useful prescriptions. Cure for liver complaint in children. We agree that we are overworked, and need rest. A week on the rolling deep? George suggests the River. Montmorency lodges an objection. Original motion carried by majority of three to one.

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.

We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that he had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what he was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into some fearful, devastating scourge, I know and, before I had glanced half down the list of premonitory symptoms, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever read the symptoms discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vituss Dance found, as I expected, that I had that too, began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Brights disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaids knee.