Name: Three Men in a Boat
Rating: 3.909090909090909 (66 reviews)
ISBN: 9780140437508

Jerome Klapka Jerome

A Gab Bag for Book Discussion Groups : to Say Nothing of the Dog! & Three Men on the Bummel

Three Men in a Boat

Bekki

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. Vitus’s 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.  

Bright’s 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 housemaid’s knee.

If Harris’s eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.

everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.

“Very well, then,” said my friend’s wife, rising, “all I have to say is, that I shall take the children and go to an hotel until those cheeses are eaten.  I decline to live any longer in the same house with them.”

I remember a holiday of mine being completely ruined one late autumn by our paying attention to the weather report of the local newspaper.  

“Heavy showers, with thunderstorms, may be expected to-day,” it would say on Monday, and so we would give up our picnic, and stop indoors all day, waiting for the rain. — And people would pass the house, going off in wagonettes and coaches as jolly and merry as could be, the sun shining out, and not a cloud to be seen. 

“Ah!” we said, as we stood looking out at them through the window, “won’t they come home soaked!” 

And we chuckled to think how wet they were going to get, and came back and stirred the fire, and got our books, and arranged our specimens of seaweed and cockle shells.  

By twelve o’clock, with the sun pouring into the room, the heat became quite oppressive, and we wondered when those heavy showers and occasional thunderstorms were going to begin. 

“Ah! they’ll come in the afternoon, you’ll find,” we said to each other.  “Oh, won’t those people get wet.  What a lark!” 

At one o’clock, the landlady would come in to ask if we weren’t going out, as it seemed such a lovely day. 

“No, no,” we replied, with a knowing chuckle, “not we.  We don’t mean to get wet—no, no.” 

And when the afternoon was nearly gone, and still there was no sign of rain, we tried to cheer ourselves up with the idea that it would come down all at once, just as the people had started for home, and were out of the reach of any shelter, and that they would thus get more drenched than ever. 

 But not a drop ever fell, and it finished a grand day, and a lovely night after it. 

The next morning we would read that it was going to be a “warm, fine to set-fair day; much heat;” and we would dress ourselves in flimsy things, and go out, and, half-an-hour after we had started, it would commence to rain hard, and a bitterly cold wind would spring up, and both would keep on steadily for the whole day, and we would come home with colds and rheumatism all over us, and go to bed.

Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless.  

The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

The first thing was that they thought the boat was not clean.  We dusted all the seats for them, and then assured them that it was, but they didn’t believe us.  One of them rubbed the cushion with the forefinger of her glove, and showed the result to the other, and they both sighed, and sat down, with the air of early Christian martyrs trying to make themselves comfortable up against the stake.

It was a lovely landscape.  It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired me.  I felt good and noble.  I felt I didn’t want to be sinful and wicked any more.  I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver hair when I got old, and all that sort of thing.

I don’t understand German myself.  I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

There was silence for a moment, and then George’s father said: “Joe!” “What’s the matter, Tom?” replied Joe’s voice from the other end of the bed. “Why, there’s a man in my bed,” said George’s father; “here’s his feet on my pillow.” “Well, it’s an extraordinary thing, Tom,” answered the other; “but I’m blest if there isn’t a man in my bed, too!” “What are you going to do?” asked George’s father. “Well, I’m going to chuck him out,” replied Joe. “So am I,” said George’s father, valiantly. There was a brief struggle, followed by two heavy bumps on the floor, and then a rather doleful voice said: “I say, Tom!” “Yes!” “How have you got on?” “Well, to tell you the truth, my man’s chucked me out.” “So’s mine!

Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan.  Night’s heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God. Only those who have worn the crown of suffering can look upon that wondrous light; and they, when they return, may not speak of it, or tell the mystery they know.

Have you ever been in a house where there are a couple courting?  It is most trying.  You think you will go and sit in the drawing-room, and you march off there.  As you open the door, you hear a noise as if somebody had suddenly recollected something, and, when you get in, Emily is over by the window, full of interest in the opposite side of the road, and your friend, John Edward, is at the other end of the room with his whole soul held in thrall by photographs of other people’s relatives. “Oh!” you say, pausing at the door, “I didn’t know anybody was here.” “Oh! didn’t you?” says Emily, coldly, in a tone which implies that she does not believe you. You hang about for a bit, then you say: “It’s very dark.  Why don’t you light the gas?” John Edward says, “Oh!” he hadn’t noticed it; and Emily says that papa does not like the gas lit in the afternoon. You tell them one or two items of news, and give them your views and opinions on the Irish question; but this does not appear to interest them.  All they remark on any subject is, “Oh!”  “Is it?”  “Did he?” “Yes,” and “You don’t say so!”  And, after ten minutes of such style of conversation, you edge up to the door, and slip out, and are surprised to find that the door immediately closes behind you, and shuts itself, without your having touched it.

Just when we had given up all hope—yes, I know that is always the time that things do happen in novels and tales; but I can’t help it.  

I resolved, when I began to write this book, that I would be strictly truthful in all things; and so I will be, even if I have to employ hackneyed phrases for the purpose. 

It was just when we had given up all hope, and I must therefore say so.  

Just when we had given up all hope, then, I suddenly caught sight, a little way below us, of a strange, weird sort of glimmer flickering among the trees on the opposite bank.  

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 love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Jerome K. Jerome

To Say Nothing of the Dog ; Three Men on the Bummel

Belle

The first third or so is really fun, but once they get going on the river it's super tedious. I skipped a bunch of chunks that just talk about boating or the river.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford.The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers - the jokes seem fresh and witty even today.The three men are based on Jerome himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom J. often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.

Sarah Escorsa

So this is the second time I try to read this classic but for some reason I just can't get past the first 50 pages... All the people I know that have read Three Men in a Boat loved it and think it one of the funniest books ever written. Well this is a mystery too me as I simply find the book boring and don't enjoy Jerome's writing at all... I really wanted to like this book but it just didn't happen.

Labla

Sujay

Alan

'Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.' Suffering from every malady in the book except housemaid's knee, three men and a dog decide to head for a restful vacation on the Thames. Anticipating peace and leisure, they encounter, in fact, the joys of roughing it, of getting their boat stuck in locks, of being towed by amateurs, of having to eat their own cooking and, of course, of coping with the glorious English weather.

Three Men in a Boat A Gab Bag for Book Discussion Groups : to Say Nothing of the Dog! & Three Men on the Bummel

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