Over the next twenty years, Jerome’s other books and plays were not always treated kindly either, leading him to quip in his autobiography that he was “ the best abused author in England. The gulf between literary judgement and reader enjoyment was never so great. True, at times it reads like an elaborate pub crawl from Kingston-Upon-Thames to Oxford, and long, witty asides swamp the original intention of an informative travel guide to London’s great river, but what exasperated the critics was its appeal to the ‘lower classes’, which, in retrospect, and considering the massive sales figures, appears to include us all. The funny thing about humour is that critics don’t like it: early reviews lambasted Three Men in a Boat. Incidentally, so were works of Charles Dickens – while visiting Moscow in the 1970s, I was bemused to receive many expressions of sympathy, for what were believed to be the impoverished conditions in England, as my hosts plied me with extra helpings of borshch. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) has been continuously in print since 1889 and sold millions.ĭespite its very Englishness – who else would name a dog Montmorency? – Three Men in a Boat had international influence, becoming required reading for literature in Russian school curricula. So what is the secret of a book that has kept us laughing for 124 years? Jerome K. Humour, the most idiosyncratic of emotions, often evades the writer who tries to be funny.
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