‘I did not intend to write a funny book, at first’ wrote Jerome J. Jerome of Three Men in a Boat, which has since become a comic classic.

When J. the narrator, George, Harris, and Montmorency the dog, set off on their hilarious misadventures, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts, imaginary illnesses, butter pats and tins of pineapple chunks.

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Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer 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 out of place in the mostly comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how current it seems to modern readers – the jokes seem fresh and witty even today.

The three men are based on Jerome himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, 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.

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Jerome Klapka Jerome, best known as the author of ‘Three Men in a Boat’, one of the great comic masterpieces of the English language, was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2nd May 1859, the youngest of four children.

His father, who had interests in the local coal and iron industries and was a prominent non-conformist preacher, had moved to the town in 1855 and installed the family in a fashionable middle class house in Bradford Street where they lived in comparative comfort until 1861. Following the collapse of the family business, the Jeromes moved first to Stourbridge and thence to Poplar in the East End of London where he was brought up in relative poverty.

Jerome left school at fourteen and worked variously as a clerk, a hack journalist, an actor (‘I have played every part in Hamlet except Ophelia’) and a schoolmaster. His first book ‘On the Stage and Off’ was published in 1885 and this was followed by numerous plays, books and magazine articles.

In 1927, one year after writing his autobiography My Life and Times, he was made a Freeman of the Borough of Walsall. He died the same year and is buried in Ewelme in Oxfordshire.

Though a relaxed, urbane man, Jerome was a relentless explorer of new ideas and experiences. He travelled widely throughout Europe, was a pioneer of skiing in the Alps and visited Russia and America several times. He was a prolific writer whose work has been translated into many foreign languages, but as Jerome himself said: “It is as the author of ‘Three Men in a Boat’ that the public persists in remembering me.”

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