Three Men in a Boat Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wall
(1902).
    8 . Robert Tressell was the pen-name of Robert Noonan (
c
. 1870–1911), a Liverpudlian house-painter.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
was published posthumously, in 1914: it is set in Hastings, but the scenes it describes would have been all too familiar to East End dwellers.
    9 . Like Jerome, George Gissing (1857–1903) had experience of life at its seamiest and most destitute: in
New Grub Street
he described the existence of impoverished hack-writers, eking out a livelihood in ways familiar to the youthful Jerome.
    10 . Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) was the prototypical Press baron. He founded what was to become the Amalgamated Press in 1887: he took over the
Evening News
in 1894, and among his journalistic creations were
Answers
(1888), the
Daily Mail
(1896) and the
Daily Mirror
(1903). In due course he became Lord Northcliffe.
    11 . George Newnes (1851–1910) was an influential and successful newspaper and magazine proprietor. He founded
Tit-Bits
(1881) and the
Strand Magazine
, where many of the Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in print.
    12 . Charles Mudie (1818–90) opened his Lending Library in Oxford Street in 1852. His name is forever associated with the long ‘three-decker’ novels beloved of the mid-Victorians; like W. H. Smith, he is believed to have exercised a degree of informal censorship via his disapproval of anything remotely
risqué
or immoral.
    13 . W. H. Smith (1825–91) opened his first railway bookstall on Euston Station in 1848: the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers in 1855 enabled him to sell cheap newspapers as well as books, and before long his shops were doing brisk business on railway stations up and down the country. Known as ‘Old Morality’, he shared Mudie’s views about the desirability of wholesome reading; but he encouraged publishers to abandon the three-decker novel in favour of single-volume works, which took up less shelf-space and could more easily be read on trains. Later in life he took to politics, and as First Lord of the Admiralty he was mocked by W. S. Gilbert in
The Pirates of Penzance
(‘Stick to your desk and never go to sea, / And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee’: for Harris’s rendition, see p. 62 ).
    14 . The embattled hero of H. G. Wells’s
The History of Mr Polly
(1910): he was, in fact, a shop assistant, but has much in common with the perkier kind of late-Victorian and Edwardian clerk.
    15 . Mr Pooter’s disrespectful son; he too works as a clerk, but unlike hisfather he refuses to be got down by life or by the grandeur of those set above him.
    16 . J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) is best-known as the creator of Peter Pan; his other plays included
The Admirable Crichton
(1902) and
Dear Brutus
(1917).
    17 . See ‘The Tin-Openers’ in
Complete Essays
by V. S. Pritchett (Chatto & Windus, 1991).
    18 . W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943) was born and grew up in Wapping, and many of his short stories are set in the East End docks.

Further Reading
Carey, John
‘A Victorian Clerk’s Tale’ in
Original Copy
(Faber, London, 1987)
Carey, John
The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939
(Faber, London, 1992)
Connolly, Joseph
Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography
(Orbis, London, 1982)
Jerome, Jerome K.      
Paul Kelver
(Hutchinson, London, 1902)
Jerome, Jerome K.
My Life and Times
(Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1926)
Moss, Alfred
Jerome K. Jerome: His Life and Work
(Selwyn & Blount, London, 1929)
Pritchett, V. S.
‘The Tin-Openers’ in
The Complete Essays
(Chatto & Windus, London, 1991)
Wilson, D. G.
The Victorian Thames
(Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1991)

THREE MEN IN A BOAT
Preface to the First Edition
    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,