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Three Men In a Boat
(1889)
This story was inspired by Jerome's honeymoon and based on himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave, whom he'd met while a clerk, and Carl Hentschel, whom he'd met through the theatre. It was an instant success and cinched his reputation as a humourist.
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A humorous account by Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide,[1] 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 seem fresh and witty even today.[2] 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.[1] The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional,[1] but "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog."[2] The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff.[Note 2] 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.
Because of the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, entitled Three Men on the Bummel.--Submitted by Anonymous
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