Book of the Week: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

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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