The Bummel

A few weeks ago, I picked up Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on Wheels at a library book sale.  I did not know much about Jerome, who apparently was quite popular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, but was intrigued by the promise of an adventure on bicycles.  The book, which is a very fast read, is light on the adventure, but long on the dry and witty digressions, broad satire, and fond absurdity.  Jerome seems to be the spiritual father of Bill Bryson, Monty Python, and the Fat Cyclist.

One of the things that struck me is the timelessness of some of his satiric points, especially since satire does not always age very well.  As the narrator is preparing for his trip, one of his friends, who will also be making the bicycle journey through the Black Forest, arrives with an advertisement for some new device for bicycles.  In this case, the newfangled thing happens to be brakes, but the narrator recalls one of Harris’s other short-lived love affairs with slickly advertised bicycle accessories.  He admonishes his friend:

You give up that idea; this is an imperfect world, a world of joy and sorrow mingled.  There may be a Better Land where bicycle saddles are made our of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.  There was that saddle you bought in Birmingham; it was divided in the middle, and looked like a pair of kidneys.

I laughed at this: one can still buy a saddle that looks just like this, and it is still touted as something daring, new, and fresh.  And of course it promises the rainbow and cloud-upholstered comfort of this saddle from over 100 years ago.  The narrator goes on for pages, criticizing the various new contraptions that gullible Harris has at one time or another bolted to his poor machine, while Harris blushingly tries to justify his purchases.

Later, one of the other travelers, George, complains bitterly that the cycle he is riding must be defective for it does not act at all like the machines featured on the advertising posters.  This complaint tempts the narrator to launch into a brilliantly funny satiric sketch dissecting various bicycle ads.  He says:

Generally speaking, the rider is a lady, and then one feels, that for perfect bodily rest combined with entire freedom from mental anxiety, slumber upon a water-bed cannot compare with bicycle riding upon a hilly road.  No fairy traveling on a summer cloud could take things more easily than does the bicycle girl, according to the poster.  Her costume for cycling in hot weather is ideal.  Old-fashioned landladies might refuse her lunch, it is true; and a narrow-minded police force might desire to secure her and wrap her in a rug preliminary to summoning her, but such she heeds not.

It is somehow reassuring to know that, despite the many technological changes in bicycles, they are essentially the same machines, even down to their advertising schemes.  I’ll have more to say about this book in a subsequent post.

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