Three Men in a Boat - Softcover

Jerome, Jerome K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1514681358 ISBN 13: 9781514681350

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston 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 seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) 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 J. 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. 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).

About this title

From the Publisher:

7 1-hour cassettes

About the Author:

Jerome K Jerome was born in Walsall in Staffordshire, England in 1859. He was the youngest of the four children of Jerome Clapp Jerome, who was a preacher and architect. His first work was On the Stage and Off, published in 1885. This novel, and the play Barbara, are inspired by his experiences in the theatre. This was followed by several plays, books and magazine articles. He is best known for his comic rendition of a boating holiday taken by three friends, Three Men in a Boat. The story is loosely based on his own various experiences of boating on the Thames. The three men are a fictionalised representations of Jerome himself, and two of his friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel. He followed this up with a sequel, Three Men in a Bummel, but this was not as popular as the first book, which has become one of the most well-loved books of all time.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1514681358
• ISBN 13: 9781514681350
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120