Three Men In A Boat

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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 holidays on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. 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 is just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. 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 about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers, the jokes seems fresh and witty even today.

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Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat. Jerome was born in Caldmore, Walsall, England, where he is honoured in a display at Walsall Museum, and was brought up in poverty in London. Jerome was the fourth child of Jerome Clapp (who later renamed himself Jerome Clapp Jerome), an ironmonger and lay preacher who dabbled in architecture, and Marguerite Jones. He had two sisters, Paulina and Blandina, and one brother, Milton, who died at an early age. Jerome was registered, like his father's amended name, as Jerome Clapp Jerome, and the Klapka appears to bea later variation (after the exiled Hungarian general Gyorgy Klapka). Owing to bad investments in the local mining industry, the family suffered poverty,and debt collectors often visited, an experience Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My life and Times (1926). The young Jerome wished to go into politics or be a man of letters, but the death of both his parents in 1872, when he was 13 years old, forced him to quit is studies and find work to support himself. He was employed at the London and North Western Railway, initially collecting coal that fell along the railway, and remained there for four years. In 1877, inspired by his older sister Blandina's love for the theatre, Jerome had had decided to try his hand at acting, under the stage name Harold Crichton.