Three Men in a Boat

Front Cover
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Jun 1, 2011 - 128 pages
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers - the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who went on to become a senior manager in Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom he often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.

About the author (2011)

Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, England on May 2, 1859. He grew up in London and had to leave school at the age of 14 because of his parents' death. Afterwards, he worked as a clerk, an actor, a journalist, and a school teacher. In 1885, he published his first book On the Stage - and Off: The Brief Career of a Would-Be Actor. This was followed by numerous plays, books, and magazine articles including Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, Three Men in a Boat, and Three Men on the Bummel. He founded the weekly magazine To-Day in 1893 and edited it and a monthly magazine called The Idler until 1898. He also worked as a lecturer. During World War I, he enlisted in the French army as an ambulance driver because he was rejected for active service in his own country. He published his autobiography My Life and Times in 1926. He suffered a paralytic stroke and a cerebral hemorrhage and died on June 14, 1927.

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