posted on 12 Jan 2023

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, illustrated by Paul Cox

Jerome’s 1889 classic, Three Men in a Boat started life as a genuine attempt to write a travel guide tracing a journey from London - specifically Kingston upon Thames - to Oxford. In the writing however, Jerome ended up producing one of the great comic novels that seems as fresh and modern today as it must have back in that late Victorian high summer. Not that its publication was met with universal praise at the time - many thought it vulgar and a sneering insult to both the middle and working classes (depending of course on which rung of the social class ladder the critic considered themselves to be).

Jerome retained plenty of descriptive travel writing in the final text but it really isn’t the local detail that captures the reader’s imagination. The real pleasure of the book is the series of comic vignettes that describe the absurd scrapes and misunderstandings in which our three young City gents - J, George and Harris along with their dog Montmorency - find themselves. Food, or the lack of it, looms large on the three men’s time and their collective failures in pulling, pushing, punting and steering their boat provides Jerome with plenty of comic asides and byways.

But it’s not specifically the comic doings of the three men, their dog and boat that I want to focus on here but the illustrative art of Paul Cox who provides a range of full single and double page colour spreads that are sprinkled liberally through the Folio Society edition that I’ve been reading.

Born in 1957, Cox went to Camberwell College of Art and the Royal College of Art in Kensington and since graduating has been a freelance artist and illustrator working for a range of periodicals and publications - including a host of commissions for the Folio Society. He has developed a long-term relationship with the Chris Beetles Gallery where he exhibits his work. The gallery describe his work in this way:

“Paul Cox’s fluid, immediate draughtsmanship and vibrant colour make him one of the most enjoyable and versatile of contemporary illustrators. Well known for his warm and witty contributions to books and magazines, he has ranged in his work as a designer between stamps and stage sets.”

His style perfectly suits the atmosphere Jerome creates in the book. The paintings that take up the double-page spreads are bold, throbbing with colour and have a charming fidelity to detail. Cox depicts the Thames as an environment bursting with middle-class Victorian pleasure-seekers - men in blazers and boaters, the women with extravagant hats, full-corseted dresses and parasols.

But he’s also able to do the smaller, more intimate portraits that head-up the individual chapters. There’s nothing terribly subtle about the painting but he’s able to catch a look, a moment that’s as absurd as Jerome hints at in the text.

Three Men in a Boat is custom-written to be illustrated and Paul Cox is the perfect artist to supplement the text - together writer and artist make a book that is a genuinely pleasurable experience to immerse yourself in for an afternoon’s reading. This won’t tax you, trouble you and probe into difficult issues but it will make you smile - and God know’s we all need that at the moment….

Copies of the Folio Society edition are very affordable and can be found for not much more than £10 or so. It’s a bargain.

Terry Potter

January 2023