Jerome K. Jerome

Chatty and self-mocking, turning small complaints into elaborate comic digressions.

Jerome K. Jerome — Three Men in a Boat (1889)

• Jerome K. Jerome, writerThree Men in a Boat (1889); the corpus quoted here
• The comic digression, registerEnglish humorous prose built on leaving the subject and returning to it

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889), Project Gutenberg ebook 308. Four contiguous runs: the opening of chapter one, the planning of the trip, the food question, and Moulsey Lock. Jerome died in 1927, so the book is public domain in the United States and in countries applying life plus seventy.

4 source files, 3,367 words

• Sentences average 12.9 to 42.8 words.
• Sentence lengths vary by at least 6.8 words — short and long in the same paragraph.
• At least 39% of the words in every 500 are distinct.
• Function words stay within 0.145 of the corpus's own distribution.
• Letter patterns stay within 0.255 of the corpus's.
• 9 phrases are banned outright.
• Anything shorter than 150 words is too small to measure.

{
  "schema": "katagami:voice-bands/v1",
  "sentence_length": {
    "mean": [
      12.9,
      42.8
    ],
    "stdev_min": 6.8
  },
  "banned_phrases": [
    "delve",
    "leverage",
    "seamless",
    "game-changer",
    "robust",
    "cutting-edge",
    "in today's fast-paced",
    "it's worth noting",
    "at the end of the day"
  ],
  "punctuation": {
    "exclamations_per_1000_words": [
      0,
      3
    ]
  },
  "type_token_ratio": {
    "min": 0.39,
    "window_words": 500
  },
  "function_words": {
    "max_distance": 0.145
  },
  "char_trigrams": {
    "max_distance": 0.255
  },
  "min_words_to_evaluate": 150
}

---
version: v3.3-lean
kind: voice
name: Jerome K. Jerome — Three Men in a Boat (1889)
slug: jerome-three-men-in-a-boat
corpus:
  consent: public_domain
  author: Jerome K. Jerome
  license: public domain (worldwide)
  samples: 4
  provenance: "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889), Project Gutenberg ebook 308. Four contiguous runs: the opening of chapter one, the planning of the trip, the food question, and Moulsey Lock. Jerome died in 1927, so the book is public domain in the United States and in countries applying life plus seventy."
  files:
    - {file_id: fl-01a087f2-b522-7d41-bd95-772ec55f07a6, source: "Three invalids", words: 850}
    - {file_id: fl-01a087f2-b9c0-7cf3-9f9c-97ed3c0898f2, source: "Plans discussed", words: 856}
    - {file_id: fl-01a087f2-bdf4-7723-ba2c-43f546c6bac7, source: "The food question", words: 834}
    - {file_id: fl-01a087f2-c28f-7463-bf2d-0264a18b7f41, source: "Moulsey Lock", words: 827}
---

# Jerome K. Jerome — Three Men in a Boat (1889)

Comic prose that leaves its subject deliberately. A plain statement of fact opens the paragraph; a second sentence takes one word of it too seriously; and the digression that follows is built out to full scale, with its own cast and its own climax, before the original sentence is resumed as though nothing had happened. The narrator is the reasonable man in the account and is never the one at fault.

## Never

- Never signals the joke before making it
- Never lets the narrator admit he is the ridiculous one
- Never explains a digression on the way back out of it
- Never uses an exclamation to carry a line the sentence should carry

## Gold standard samples

Each numbered entry is one complete corpus passage, quoted as it stands.

1. Source: Three invalids, 850 words.

   There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

   We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that _he_ had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what _he_ was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.

   It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

   [Picture: Man reading book] 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.

   I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

   I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

   Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

2. Source: Plans discussed, 856 words.

   We pulled out the maps, and discussed plans.

   We arranged to start on the following Saturday from Kingston. Harris and I would go down in the morning, and take the boat up to Chertsey, and George, who would not be able to get away from the City till the afternoon (George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two), would meet us there.

   Should we “camp out” or sleep at inns?

   George and I were for camping out. We said it would be so wild and free, so patriarchal like.

   Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen’s plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.

   From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear-guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.

   [Picture: River scene]

   Then we run our little boat into some quiet nook, and the tent is pitched, and the frugal supper cooked and eaten. Then the big pipes are filled and lighted, and the pleasant chat goes round in musical undertone; while, in the pauses of our talk, the river, playing round the boat, prattles strange old tales and secrets, sings low the old child’s song that it has sung so many thousand years—will sing so many thousand years to come, before its voice grows harsh and old—a song that we, who have learnt to love its changing face, who have so often nestled on its yielding bosom, think, somehow, we understand, though we could not tell you in mere words the story that we listen to.

   And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops down to kiss it with a sister’s kiss, and throws her silver arms around it clingingly; and we watch it as it flows, ever singing, ever whispering, out to meet its king, the sea—till our voices die away in silence, and the pipes go out—till we, common-place, everyday young men enough, feel strangely full of thoughts, half sad, half sweet, and do not care or want to speak—till we laugh, and, rising, knock the ashes from our burnt-out pipes, and say “Good-night,” and, lulled by the lapping water and the rustling trees, we fall asleep beneath the great, still stars, and dream that the world is young again—young and sweet as she used to be ere the centuries of fret and care had furrowed her fair face, ere her children’s sins and follies had made old her loving heart—sweet as she was in those bygone days when, a new-made mother, she nursed us, her children, upon her own deep breast—ere the wiles of painted civilization had lured us away from her fond arms, and the poisoned sneers of artificiality had made us ashamed of the simple life we led with her, and the simple, stately home where mankind was born so many thousands years ago.

   Harris said:

   “How about when it rained?”

   You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris—no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never “weeps, he knows not why.” 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.

   [Picture: Mermaid] If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say:

   “Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses, held by seaweed?” Harris would take you by the arm, and say:

   “I know what it is, old man; you’ve got a chill. Now, you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted—put you right in less than no time.”

   Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with:

   “So glad you’ve come, old fellow; I’ve found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.”

   In the present instance, however, as regarded the camping out, his practical view of the matter came as a very timely hint. Camping out in rainy weather is not pleasant.

3. Source: The food question, 834 words.

   Then we discussed the food question. George said:

   “Begin with breakfast.” (George is so practical.) “Now for breakfast we shall want a frying-pan”—(Harris said it was indigestible; but we merely urged him not to be an ass, and George went on)—“a tea-pot and a kettle, and a methylated spirit stove.”

   “No oil,” said George, with a significant look; and Harris and I agreed.

   We had taken up an oil-stove once, but “never again.” It had been like living in an oil-shop that week. It oozed. I never saw such a thing as paraffine oil is to ooze. We kept it in the nose of the boat, and, from there, it oozed down to the rudder, impregnating the whole boat and everything in it on its way, and it oozed over the river, and saturated the scenery and spoilt the atmosphere. Sometimes a westerly oily wind blew, and at other times an easterly oily wind, and sometimes it blew a northerly oily wind, and maybe a southerly oily wind; but whether it came from the Arctic snows, or was raised in the waste of the desert sands, it came alike to us laden with the fragrance of paraffine oil.

   And that oil oozed up and ruined the sunset; and as for the moonbeams, they positively reeked of paraffine.

   We tried to get away from it at Marlow. We left the boat by the bridge, and took a walk through the town to escape it, but it followed us. The whole town was full of oil. We passed through the church-yard, and it seemed as if the people had been buried in oil. The High Street stunk of oil; we wondered how people could live in it. And we walked miles upon miles out Birmingham way; but it was no use, the country was steeped in oil.

   At the end of that trip we met together at midnight in a lonely field, under a blasted oak, and took an awful oath (we had been swearing for a whole week about the thing in an ordinary, middle-class way, but this was a swell affair)—an awful oath never to take paraffine oil with us in a boat again-except, of course, in case of sickness.

   Therefore, in the present instance, we confined ourselves to methylated spirit. Even that is bad enough. You get methylated pie and methylated cake. But methylated spirit is more wholesome when taken into the system in large quantities than paraffine oil.

   For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon, which were easy to cook, cold meat, tea, bread and butter, and jam. For lunch, he said, we could have biscuits, cold meat, bread and butter, and jam—but _no cheese_. Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the whole boat to itself. It goes through the hamper, and gives a cheesy flavour to everything else there. You can’t tell whether you are eating apple-pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems cheese. There is too much odour about cheese.

   I remember a friend of mine, buying a couple of cheeses at Liverpool. Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards. I was in Liverpool at the time, and my friend said that if I didn’t mind he would get me to take them back with me to London, as he should not be coming up for a day or two himself, and he did not think the cheeses ought to be kept much longer.

   “Oh, with pleasure, dear boy,” I replied, “with pleasure.”

   I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we turned the corner. There, the wind carried a whiff from the cheeses full on to our steed. It woke him up, and, with a snort of terror, he dashed off at three miles an hour. The wind still blew in his direction, and before we reached the end of the street he was laying himself out at the rate of nearly four miles an hour, leaving the cripples and stout old ladies simply nowhere.

   It took two porters as well as the driver to hold him in at the station; and I do not think they would have done it, even then, had not one of the men had the presence of mind to put a handkerchief over his nose, and to light a bit of brown paper.

4. Source: Moulsey Lock, 827 words.

   It was while passing through Moulsey Lock that Harris told me about his maze experience. It took us some time to pass through, as we were the only boat, and it is a big lock. I don’t think I ever remember to have seen Moulsey Lock, before, with only one boat in it. It is, I suppose, Boulter’s not even excepted, the busiest lock on the river.

   I have stood and watched it, sometimes, when you could not see any water at all, but only a brilliant tangle of bright blazers, and gay caps, and saucy hats, and many-coloured parasols, and silken rugs, and cloaks, and streaming ribbons, and dainty whites; when looking down into the lock from the quay, you might fancy it was a huge box into which flowers of every hue and shade had been thrown pell-mell, and lay piled up in a rainbow heap, that covered every corner.

   On a fine Sunday it presents this appearance nearly all day long, while, up the stream, and down the stream, lie, waiting their turn, outside the gates, long lines of still more boats; and boats are drawing near and passing away, so that the sunny river, from the Palace up to Hampton Church, is dotted and decked with yellow, and blue, and orange, and white, and red, and pink. All the inhabitants of Hampton and Moulsey dress themselves up in boating costume, and come and mouch round the lock with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke, and watch the boats; and, altogether, what with the caps and jackets of the men, the pretty coloured dresses of the women, the excited dogs, the moving boats, the white sails, the pleasant landscape, and the sparkling water, it is one of the gayest sights I know of near this dull old London town.

   The river affords a good opportunity for dress. For once in a way, we men are able to show _our_ taste in colours, and I think we come out very natty, if you ask me. I always like a little red in my things—red and black. You know my hair is a sort of golden brown, rather a pretty shade I’ve been told, and a dark red matches it beautifully; and then I always think a light-blue necktie goes so well with it, and a pair of those Russian-leather shoes and a red silk handkerchief round the waist—a handkerchief looks so much better than a belt.

   Harris always keeps to shades or mixtures of orange or yellow, but I don’t think he is at all wise in this. His complexion is too dark for yellows. Yellows don’t suit him: there can be no question about it. I want him to take to blue as a background, with white or cream for relief; but, there! the less taste a person has in dress, the more obstinate he always seems to be. It is a great pity, because he will never be a success as it is, while there are one or two colours in which he might not really look so bad, with his hat on.

   George has bought some new things for this trip, and I’m rather vexed about them. The blazer is loud. I should not like George to know that I thought so, but there really is no other word for it. He brought it home and showed it to us on Thursday evening. We asked him what colour he called it, and he said he didn’t know. He didn’t think there was a name for the colour. The man had told him it was an Oriental design. George put it on, and asked us what we thought of it. Harris said that, as an object to hang over a flower-bed in early spring to frighten the birds away, he should respect it; but that, considered as an article of dress for any human being, except a Margate nigger, it made him ill. George got quite huffy; but, as Harris said, if he didn’t want his opinion, why did he ask for it?

   What troubles Harris and myself, with regard to it, is that we are afraid it will attract attention to the boat.

   [Picture: Young lady] Girls, also, don’t look half bad in a boat, if prettily dressed. Nothing is more fetching, to my thinking, than a tasteful boating costume. But a “boating costume,” it would be as well if all ladies would understand, ought to be a costume that can be worn in a boat, and not merely under a glass-case. It utterly spoils an excursion if you have folk in the boat who are thinking all the time a good deal more of their dress than of the trip. It was my misfortune once to go for a water picnic with two ladies of this kind. We did have a lively time!

## Signature vocabulary

Reach for these:

- the flat register of the practical man: we arranged, we discussed, it was decided
- the vocabulary of household and river things
- names used bare: George, Harris, Montmorency
- the sudden elevated word inside a plain sentence

These 4 habits identify the register faster than anything else:

- the digression built to mock-epic scale and then dropped
- the narrator's own reasonableness asserted while he is plainly wrong
- a list that starts practical and ends absurd
- a return to the abandoned sentence without acknowledgement

Words and constructions this voice refuses:

delve, leverage, seamless, game-changer, robust, cutting-edge, in today's fast-paced, it's worth noting, at the end of the day.

## Moves

- State the ordinary thing first and let the second sentence overreact to it
- Build the digression out with the machinery of a real narrative
- Hand the funniest line to someone other than the narrator
- Return to the abandoned subject as though no time had passed
- Let the joke arrive in the last clause of a long sentence

## Register

- narration: first person, reasonable, self-exculpating
- digression: fully built, with its own cast and its own end
- dialogue: reported flat, the absurdity left in the content

## Measured fingerprint

Measured over 4 passages and 3367 words. Sentence means run from 18.5 to 31.7 words, with a standard deviation inside each passage of 12.3 to 45.7, so the length varies as much as it averages. Windowed type-token ratio over 500 words sits between 0.48 and 0.57. Per thousand words the corpus carries 8.0 semicolons, 1.2 exclamation marks and 0.9 of the fourteen connectives the checker counts (however, moreover, thus and the rest). The commonest sentence openers are i (36), it (16), we (12), the (8), harris (8).

Write to these numbers. The checker below reads them from the corpus and
applies them to anything written in this voice.

```json
{
  "schema": "katagami:voice-bands/v1",
  "sentence_length": {
    "mean": [
      12.9,
      42.8
    ],
    "stdev_min": 6.8
  },
  "banned_phrases": [
    "delve",
    "leverage",
    "seamless",
    "game-changer",
    "robust",
    "cutting-edge",
    "in today's fast-paced",
    "it's worth noting",
    "at the end of the day"
  ],
  "punctuation": {
    "exclamations_per_1000_words": [
      0,
      3
    ]
  },
  "type_token_ratio": {
    "min": 0.39,
    "window_words": 500
  },
  "function_words": {
    "max_distance": 0.145
  },
  "char_trigrams": {
    "max_distance": 0.255
  },
  "min_words_to_evaluate": 150
}
```

## Corpus

The full text of every passage above:

- Passage 1: /api/file/fl-01a087f2-b522-7d41-bd95-772ec55f07a6 (Three invalids, 850 words)
- Passage 2: /api/file/fl-01a087f2-b9c0-7cf3-9f9c-97ed3c0898f2 (Plans discussed, 856 words)
- Passage 3: /api/file/fl-01a087f2-bdf4-7723-ba2c-43f546c6bac7 (The food question, 834 words)
- Passage 4: /api/file/fl-01a087f2-c28f-7463-bf2d-0264a18b7f41 (Moulsey Lock, 827 words)