Jerome K Jerome

Three Men In A Boat Jerome K Jerome

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames. to Oxford and back to Kingston. 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 like a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it seems to modern readers: the jokes have been praised for being fresh and witty. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing company, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome used to take boat trips. The dog, Montmorency, is completely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, it developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all English people, contains an element of the dog." The trip is one of the typical boating holidays of the time on a Thames camping skiff. This was just after the commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames died down, replaced by the craze of the 1880s for boating as a leisure activity.