2. Read the passage from "Tree man in a boat" by Jerome K Jerome, write the stylistic analysis and send.
Jerome
K. Jerome, in full Jerome Klapka Jerome, (born May 2,
1859, Walsall,
Staffordshire, Eng.—died June 14, 1927, Northampton,
Northamptonshire), English novelist and playwright whose humour—warm,
unsatirical, and unintellectual—won him wide following.
Jerome left school at the age of 14, working first
as a railway clerk, then as a schoolteacher, an actor, and a journalist. His
first book, On the Stage—and Off, was published in 1885, but it was with
the publication of his next books, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle
Fellow (1886) and Three Men in a Boat (1889), that he achieved
great success; both books were widely translated. From 1892 to 1897 he was a
coeditor (with Robert Barr and George Brown Burgin) of The Idler, a
monthly magazine that
he had helped found, which featured contributions by writers such as Eden
Phillpotts, Mark Twain,
and Bret
Harte.
Jerome’s many other works include Three Men on
the Bummel (1900) and Paul Kelver (1902), an
autobiographical novel.
He also wrote a number of plays. A book of Jerome’s memoirs, My Life and
Times, was published in 1926.
We got out at Sonning, and went for a walk round the
village. It is the most fairy-like little nook on the whole river. It is more
like a stage village than one built of bricks and mortar. Every house is
smothered in roses, and now, in early June, they were bursting forth in clouds
of dainty splendour. If you stop at Sonning, put up at the "Bull,"
behind the church. It is a veritable picture of an old country inn, with green,
square courtyard in front, where, on seats beneath the trees, the old men group
of an evening to drink their ale and gossip over village politics; with low,
quaint rooms and latticed windows, and awkward stairs and winding passages.
We roamed about sweet Sonning for an hour or so, and
then, it being too late to push on past Reading, we decided to go back to one
of the Shiplake islands, and put up there for the night. It was still early
when we got settled, and George said that, as we had plenty of time, it would
be a splendid opportunity to try a good, slap-up supper. He said he would show
us what could be done up the river in the way of cooking, and suggested that,
with the vegetables and the remains of the cold beef and general odds and ends,
we should make an Irish stew.
It seemed a fascinating idea. George gathered wood
and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes. I should never
have thought that peeling potatoes was such an undertaking. The job turned out
to be the biggest thing of its kind that I had ever been in. We began
cheerfully, one might almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone
by the time the first potato was finished. The more we peeled, the more peel
there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the
eyes out, there was no potato left - at least none worth speaking of. George
came and had a look at it - it was about the size of a pea-nut.
He said:
"Oh, that won't do! You're wasting them. You
must scrape them."
So we scraped them, and that was harder work than
peeling. They are such an extraordinary shape, potatoes - all bumps and warts
and hollows. We worked steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four
potatoes. Then we struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for
scraping ourselves.
I never saw such a thing as potato-scraping for
making a fellow in a mess. It seemed difficult to believe that the
potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half smothered, could have come
off four potatoes. It shows you what can be done with economy and care.
George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes
in an Irish stew, so we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without
peeling. We also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas. George stirred
it all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so
we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the
remnants, and added them to the stew. There were half a pork pie and a bit of
cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in. Then George found half a tin of
potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot.
He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you
got rid of such a lot of things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got
cracked, and put those in. George said they would thicken the gravy.
I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing
was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced
great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and
thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water- rat
in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the
dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I
cannot say.
We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go
in or not. Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the
other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent.
He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be
on the safe side, and not try experiments.
Harris said:
"If you never try a new thing, how can you tell
what it's like? It's men such as you that hamper the world's progress. Think of
the man who first tried German sausage!"
It was a great success, that Irish stew. I don't
think I ever enjoyed a meal more. There was something so fresh and piquant about
it. One's palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things: here was a dish
with a new flavour, with a taste like nothing else on earth.
And it was nourishing, too. As George said, there
was good stuff in it. The peas and potatoes might have been a bit softer, but
we all had good teeth, so that did not matter much: and as for the gravy, it
was a poem - a little too rich, perhaps, for a weak stomach, but nutritious.
