My Favourite Books

Number 1 – Three Men In A Boat – Jerome K. Jerome In Wilkie Collins’ book ‘The Moonstone’ one of the characters is forever reading ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as a source of entertainment, enlightenment, amusement, consolation and revelation. Jerome’s book has played that role for me ever since I first opened it at the age of about 13. I was instantly captivated, and found myself howling with laughter on the very first page as I read of the author’s day in the British Museum discovering from a medical text-book that he was at death’s door – “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 a while 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 learned 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”. The book, published in 1889, does what it says on the tin, and features the adventures of three buffers (and their small dog) having a boating holiday on the Thames. The writing is drily sarcastic and ironic (my favourite style) and there are numerous set piece anecdotes which, as a teenager, I found howlingly funny. Those who have read and enjoyed this book will already be smiling at the recollection of Uncle Podger hanging a picture (“There, now the nail’s gone!”), travelling on a train with strong cheese (“Very close in here”), the 19th century behaviour of railways staff (“(the driver said) if he wasn’t the 11.5 for Kingston, he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the 10am express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction….”) and other such episodes. Of course, the most famous scene features Harris in the Hampton Court Maze (“…it was so simple that it seemed foolish- hardly worth the twopence charged for admission…..it’s absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first turning to the right…..”). Of course, Harris and his large following crowd get irredeemably lost. I was very amused, nearly twenty years after I first read the book, and nearly one hundred years after it was first published, when I boated along the Thames to Hampton Court, to hear several lost people in the maze saying things like “you just keep turning right” – I was slightly less amused when I realised that one of them was me. Perhaps I’m of the last generation who find the essentially gentle humour of this book profoundly amusing. It has sustained me on many occasions over the years. I think that at one time or another I have owned about 15 copies of the book. You will see from the cover that the edition featured here is the ‘Everyman’ edition. Every ‘Everyman’ contains the inscription- Everyman, I will go with thee, And be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side This book has fulfilled that promise for me.