(To Mention Nothing Of The Dog) by Jerome K Jerome

I hold my hands up; I’d never heard of Jerome K Jerome and had gone out of my way to avoid picking up his book when I’d seen it. A well-known discount bookstore has had an offer for the last six months where you can buy “X in 1”s by famous authors. Through this, I’d got my hands on such niceties as three books by Robert Louis Stevenson brought together as one for the sum of £1.99.

Often travelling between Birmingham and Leicester and never sure whether what I have on me will last the length of the journey, I have a habit of dipping into this store and picking up the bargains, which has so far netted me works by Twain, Conan Doyle, Verne, and Kipling. I had made a point of avoiding Jerome K Jerome though. Not only did I not know the name, I harboured some kind of inherent prejudice against it.

Well, two weeks back I found myself walking through the streets with a sleeping baby. He’d decided to skip his morning’s nap, so I didn’t want to wake him prematurely by getting him out of the pushchair for the journey home. Thirsty, I opted for a coffee break, wherein lay the problem: I hadn’t brought anything to read with me, and there was no way I could sit and have a coffee for an hour or whatever it would take for Alfie to return to the world without literary fodder.

Off to the bookstore we travelled. The “X in 1” promotion was over by now, but it appeared as though I were not the only person who had this same disparagement toward Jerome, for there rested a single issue of his book, reduced to 99p. “Ah, man. Go on then.”

Levering a big pushchair into a non-obstructing location in Starbucks requires some dexterity, especially if you’re limited by not wishing to rock the baby awake, but I eventually got there, ordered a giant coffee, and set on reading.

To my surprise, it turned out that though I didn’t recognise the author’s name, I was certainly familiar with the book. The opening page details him reading through a medical advertisement and deciding that he was afflicted with the concerned illness. Well, he visits the British Museum, reads up on ailments and their symptoms, and decides he has the whole lot, except, he is pleased to entertain, housemaid’s knee. Upon visiting the doctor, he finds it simpler to tell him “what I’ve not got” since he has “everything”.

This was a really humorous start to the book, and it promised well, as I sat smiling to myself while sipping on a nasty coffee. (I seem to be the only person in the world who prefers instant coffee to the filtered sort.) I’m not sure how it is that I’m familiar with this opening though, since I know for a fact that I’ve not read the book. Perhaps it’s my natural cynicism growing up that most symptoms of anything apply to a bunch of us and this opening gambit just seemed familiar to me since it rehashed them.

Anyway, the premise for the story is simple. J (the author) and his two buddies George and Harris (based on two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel) decide that they are overworked and that their health is suffering because of it. Their solution is to engage in a boating holiday on the Thames, accompanied by a dog, Montmorency.

The book recaps that journey, although most of the content is humorous. I’ve since read that Jerome’s intention was to write a proper travel book (hence the historical details given every time they reach a new location) interspersed with light-hearted humour, but the anecdotes became so frequent and such a bulky part of the book that they took over. This isn’t a bad thing, for the book is ever so light reading and flows without problem. And it turned out to Jerome’s advantage too, since it sold like hotcakes, to the consternation of contemporary society back in 1889 who derided that he could produce a book that is accessible to the lower orders.

A fun read, and not overly lengthy. Since finishing it, I tried a couple chapters of Jerome’s “The Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow”, though have no further interest in it. That’s not an indictment of the writing, which is perfectly pleasant, more that it’s but rarely that I read “pointless” works such as this which is humour for the sake of humour, especially when I have thousands of pages in other books waiting to be read.

Tags: Jerome K Jerome

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