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Abstract
At least some of the meaning of the maritime for the English has come to them through its portrayal in the various media, such as paintings, poetry and literature. This relationship appears to have been particularly relevant during the late Victorian and Edwardian era, when the need of the population to understand the sea and how to sail it was seen as vital to our continued well-being as a nation. Of the large number of texts published during this period, two have come down to us as aquatic classics – Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). The continued presentation of these texts, in theatre and film adaptations, had decontextualized them, so that they have lost their radical contemporary message. In the case of Three Men in a Boat that the lower middle class, the clerical class, had alternative speech patterns and values that were in conflict with the established class system. In the case of The Wind in the Willows the class system is represented as inherently unstable and there is an ever-present risk of civil strife, both in the country and the city.
Notes
1 Bolland, In the Wake, 23. The modern reader can follow the actual route taken by the three men by consulting this text.
2 The selling of land along the Thames accelerated during the agricultural slump that started at the end of the 1870s and was to last for 20 years, during which time the price of cereals halved. ‘The capital was surrounded by arable counties which felt the impact of the depression more intensively than grazing areas.’ Davis, History of Britain, 17.
3 See Bolland, Victorians on the Thames.
4 It became a regular event after 1856. Dodd, Boat Race; Dodd, Henley Royal Regatta.
5 Words by William Johnson Cory and composed by Captain Algernon Drummond. See Byrne and Churchill, Eton Book of the River.
6 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 159. All page references are from the Penguin Classic edition, 2004. Three Men in a Boat was first serialized in Home Chimes between August 1888 and June 1889. Its editor, F. W. Robinson, removed the travel guide sections and also insisted on a change of title from Story of the Thames, which Jerome made, giving us its present title. Bolland, In the Wake, 57; Oulton, Below the Fairy City, 72. It was published in book form by J. W. Arrowsmith of Bristol in August 1889.
7 The usual passage was downstream from Oxford, as one had the current flowing with the boat. In Reed's popular schoolboy story, Fifth Form at St. Dominic's, three of the pupils row from Oxford to London in their holidays. Newbolt, in My World as in My Time, records making the same journey as an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-1880s.
8 Jerome, My Life and Times, 75.
9 Mr John Beauchamp gave a performance in ‘Mates’ at St George's Hall on 27 Mar., 1890. (The Era, 29 Mar. 1890) and again at the Du Val Fund Matinee on 19 Nov. (The Era, 15 Nov. 1890). In Ipswich, Mr Giddens entertained the company at the party of ‘Frank Danby’, the authoress of ‘Dr. Phillips’ by reading out a chapter (Ipswich Journal, 21 Jun. 1890). It was included in C. E. Clegg's programme at the YMCA, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool (Liverpool Mercury, 14 Oct. 1890); M. C. Robins Piercy amused the audience during the interval of the benefit of the King's Heath Cricket Club (Birmingham Pictorial and Dart, 5 March 1897). At the Annual Prize Distribution, at St. Ebbe's Girls’ School, the programme by the girls included a reading of a selection from Three Men in a Boat (Jackson's Oxford Journal 26 Dec. 1891).
10 Trilling. E. M. Forster, 102.
11 Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 11. The fear and violent condemnation created by this threat has been ably described in Carey, Intellectual and the Masses, 46-70.
12 In this positioning, he differs from the other contemporary humorous best-seller, George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody, serialized in 1889, and appearing in book form in 1992. We are invited to laugh at Mr Pooter and his pretensions. By contrast, we are invited to muck around and laugh with the three men. We can therefore give ourselves a much more unconditional permission to laugh.
13 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 58.
14 Ibid., 58. Jerome's italics.
15 Ibid., 58–9.
16 Ibid., 58.
17 Ibid., 59.
18 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 116.
19 Ibid., 56.
20 Ibid., 111.
21 Ibid., 145. This incident is based on a real case. ‘In 1887, a Gaiety girl, Alice Sarah Douglass drowned herself in the river near Goring. Jerome read a report of this tragedy in the Berkshire Chronicle and decided to incorporate it into his own story.’ Matthew and Green, Three Men in a Boat, 152.
22 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 146. Infidelity was a theme Jerome returned to in his 1892 non-humorous novel, Weeds.
23 The cold dip was part of Athleticism's fetish with the healthy body. Mangan, Athleticism.
24 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 90–1.
25 Matthew and Green suggest that Jerome probably had R. J. Turk's boat yard in Kingston in mind. The double-sculling skiff was available for £3 15s. a week, and came with ‘two Pairs of Sculls, two Boat Hooks, Mast and Sail, Cushions, Carpet, Mats Grating, fore and aft. Cane Rail, Rudder Lines & c.’, as shown in their advertisement reproduced in Matthew and Green, Three Men in a Boat, 52.
26 Trollope, British Sports and Pastimes, 197.
27 Cusack, ‘Rise of Aquatic Recreation’; De Boise, 60 Years of Businessmen & Artisans.
28 Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 141.
29 As late as 1962, a record of that title, written by Tony Hatch and Les Reed, all about genteel, sunny, boating, was a hit record for Josh MacRae on the Pye record label.
30 Green, Kenneth Grahame, ix–x. An anarchist bomb plot was the theme of Conrad's The Secret Agent, published in 1907, the year before The Wind in the Willows.
31 Green, Kenneth Grahame, 104 and 228.
32 Grahame, Wind in the Willows, 12–13.
33 Ibid., 57–61.
34 Ibid., 63.
35 The Wind in the Willows was one of the first novels to foreground car travel. Humber, Sunbeam and Wolseley cars started being produced around the turn of the century. Grahame links Toad's journey into the Wide World with yet other means of travel, namely the train and barge.
36 Grahame, Wind in the Willows, 199.
37 Ibid., 127.
38 Ibid., 11.
39 Parker, More about Toad, 10.
40 Grahame, Wind in the Willows, 228.
41 Ibid., 93.
42 Ibid., 99.
43 Parker, in More about Toad, 11, suggests that his trial has similarities with Oscar Wilde's.
44 Grahame is drawing on actual events. ‘Throughout the late 1890s the police had been bothered by complaints about young boys throwing stones or spitting from the London bridges on to boats and their passengers below. In 1896 while sculling at Putney, an oarsman had been sunk by a stone-throwing youth.’ Pearson, Hooligan, 89.
45 Grahame, Wind in the Willows, 319.
46 Quoted without reference by Gooderson, My Dearest Mouse, 190.
47 ‘Three Men in a Boat’, Judy: The Conservative Comic, 28 May 1890.
48 At the beginning of the book the author, after consulting a medical dictionary, concludes that he has every disease under the sun; this may be a dig at this accusation of ‘a little learning’.
49 Jerome, My Life and Times, 52. Punch had already called him ‘’Arry K. ’Arry’ after the publication of Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow.
50 Whether working-class speech has any validity, as opposed to it being inferior to ‘educated’ English, has been a long running dispute. In the 1960s Basil Bernstein suggested that the working class use restricted codes and the middle class elaborated codes, and that both were valid forms of communication. His best-known text was aptly titled Class, Codes and Control.
51 1913: Paul Branson; 1922: Nancy Barnhart; 1927: Wyndham Payne. Prince, Kenneth Grahame, 335).
52 Milne, Toad of Toad Hall, viii–x. Quoted by Green, Kenneth Grahame, 347.
53 Townsend, Written for Children, 134.
54 Chapter VII, ‘The Pipers at the Gates of Dawn’, a celebration of pantheism, is most often omitted. The composition of the book as a series of separate strands is discussed in Bender. ‘Written on the Waves’, 178–220.
55 Grahame, Wind in the Willows, 285.
Additional information
Michael Bender had a career as a consultant clinical psychologist. He returned to university to study English Literature, gaining an MA and PhD at Exeter University, researching yachting literature between 1888 and 1939. He has written and spoken extensively on yachting literature, and on madness and yachting. He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of yachting. He is on the committees of the Association of Yachting Historians and of the South West Maritime History Society and an Honorary Fellow of the History Department, University of Exeter.