Three Men in a Boat
(To Say Nothing of the Dog)
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome Klapka 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 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 have been praised as fresh and witty.
The three men are based on Jerome himself 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 business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome 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.
Following the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels, 1900).
Excerpted from Three Men in a Boat on Wikipedia.
Three Men in a Boat
| Author | Jerome Klapka Jerome |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Comedy novel, Humorous stories |
| Copyright | Public domain in the United States. |
| Book cover | - |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg |
| Scans | Google-digitized |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Nick Bulka 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 |
| Read online | Three Men in a Boat |