Only Tweedy British Humor Can Save Us

Erie Mitchell on Jerome K. Jerome

Dear Republic,

This is, really, the reason I started Republic of Letters and the whole point of the enterprise — to come across an essay by a writer I don’t know on a Victorian writer I’m not even close to having heard of. I don’t actually know if, as the essay suggests, the British humor novel from the late 19th/early 20th century can save our errant culture, but, as far as I can tell, nobody has any better ideas.

Get yer submissions in for “How To Save The University” and “What Has Happened To Literary Men?” at republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com. And, as the soulful, thoughtful hitman Danila Bagrov puts it in the fundraising appeal he makes at the end of Brat 2: “Money. Give.” Also, as likes for these pieces creep up, that will trigger a bonus for the writers. So like away!

-The Editor

ONLY TWEEDY BRITISH HUMOR CAN SAVE US

We all know that the literary world, like mainstream culture as a whole, has been flattened by the shift to a digital landscape. Consumer habits are increasingly shaped by short form videos where the frenzied battle for your weary eyeballs means only the most base, broadly appealing works receive meaningful attention. Entire genres like romantasy or cozy fiction have sprung out of this arms race of cramming as many possible keywords and genre labels as possible into a work so the resulting TikToks can appear across more hashtags. It’s entirely possible to read hundreds of new books a year and be completely unchallenged by the material, with plot structures and character dynamics now downstream of “tropes” that exist alongside conventional marketing for a book. In addition to being urban queer fantasy, a book now may be an “enemies to lovers” or “bad guys win” work. So much of the interior is hollowed out and plastered on the surface that you don’t have to do the hard part of actually reading it, you know exactly what’s going to happen and you know the genre conventions it will follow on the way.

Naturally, there has been some pushback to this, but that pushback also merits examining. There’s a tendency, a holdover from the “litbro” days that has filtered into the public consciousness, to valorize the “difficult book” and champion some of the canon’s longest and densest books as what you, an average person, should be reading. I applaud this desire to elevate the general public’s critical reading level to this degree, and there is certainly a lot to take away from a Moby Dick or an Infinite Jest, but this is putting the cart well before the horse. If it’s really true that incoming Harvard students can’t even read full chapters of standard high school English class fare, heavily pushing impermeable bricks as the only true form of reading without the proper foundation reduces that reading to a hatchet job, hundreds of pages going by without really understanding anything but forging on to reach the finish line to say you’ve read Important Literature.

Make no mistake, the endgame of a landscape of thirty second-long videos and AI summaries and Instagrammable poetry is the death of the novel as we know it. The novel as a category of expression wasn’t handed down to us from heaven, it’s a specific structure that arose and thrived due to the conditions and values of the last thousand or so years of humanity. The internet has wildly reshaped almost every element of society, so what’s to say the novel can’t go the way of the fax machine or stationery, forced to the margins of everyday life by the grinding wheel of efficiency.

A choice between BookTok slop and a novel that really should be examined in a university setting leaves a wide gap that, honestly, most books we should read fall into. People should have their minds opened and be forced to think about their reading, but the act of reading shouldn’t be a chore in a world of increasing distraction and higher cost of entertainment products.

Cultural capital should be allocated to propagating the middlebrow novel, and one style that I think would be a successful vehicle is the late nineteenth/early twentieth century British humor novel. Think P. G. Wodehouse or some lighter Dickens. There’s no lack of literary merit, humor is one of the hardest techniques to translate across eras — and these books contain a lot to laugh at, which is no small feat. There’s no shame in enjoying reading on a surface level while still engaging with ideas and ways of living that are alien to 2025, and anyone who’s read Jeeves and Wooster can tell you those books are still very funny.

Now all that’s left is to find an author who has a single work that could definitively summarize the stylings of this era, along with an underappreciated back catalogue for new fans to unearth. My pick for this paragon of the English humor novel would be Jerome K. Jerome, whose 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat has never been out of print and has a number of film and TV adaptations. You could find a copy in any serious library; in the college town where I grew up the public library had an audiobook version read by Hugh Laurie.

Jerome represents a tradition of grammar school upbringing with connections to the theater that has been eroded by decreasing patronage of the arts. From an early age he wanted to be an intellectual and he dedicated his life to every facet of artistic and literary expression, “playing every role in Hamlet except Ophelia” in the theater, while his oeuvre includes essays, plays, and an autobiography, My Life and Times. He participated in another extinct tradition of volunteering for military service during World War I, notwithstanding his cultural status.

His novels were the culmination of a decade of trying and failing to publish pieces, of odd jobs and hustling for meager sums of money. His perseverance throughout his twenties can serve as a model for the struggling young writer who may believe they’ll never attain mainstream success, bouncing around in odd jobs while trying to “make it.” Three Men began as a guidebook and many genuine travel observations remain, yet its witty streak is unmistakable, such as in arguably its most iconic passage:

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.

The style is of its late Victorian time, but with a populist flavor. Current audiences will have to put their thinking caps on to process the outdated vernacular, but it’s breezy and not a slog at all. This style of novel is the missing middle that current cultural institutions seem incapable of serving to us. The mid-budget movie died sometime during the 2010s with no signs of life, but the mid-budget novel may hold the key to improving reading habits.

Jerome was unable to recapture the commercial success of Three Men in his later years, yet his acerbic wit never left him. A passage from his sequel Three Men on the Bummel:

Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep.

He drifts from town to town, scene to scene, wholly adopting the bohemian layabout persona that cozy fiction angles towards yet never has the playfulness to fully embrace. In a world of fullscreen video and unskippable ads, we collectively cry out for a short break, a diversion from sky-high rents and ten lane highways. In Jerome K. Jerome’s world, the wind blows, there’s breakfast in the pantry, and the sky is cloudy with a bit of sunshine. We could all use some English countryside tranquility right now.

Erie Mitchell is based in North Carolina and can be found writing on Substack about technofeudalism, culture, and art. She also DJs and plays hardware electronic sets.