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Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel (The World's Best Reading)
Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel - The World's Best Reading Author:Jerome K. Jerome Three Men In A Boat is a comic novel written by Jerome K. Jerome. Published in 1889, it is a humorous account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. Despite being nearly 130 years old, its humor still holds up quite well to anyone with a preference for dry, British wit. — The three men are based on Jerome himself (the nar... more »rator 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 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. 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.
Three Men On The Bummel is the sequel written after the success of the first book. Conceived as a fairly serious guide to amateur boating on the Thames in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome's best-known novel ended up as a hilarious account of the misadventures of three friends and a dog as they attempt to relax and enjoy themselves amid unreliable weather forecasts, imaginary illnesses, repellent cooking, and an unopenable can of pineapple chunks.Three Men in a Boat was a terrific success for its author, and a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the age. George, Harris, and J., the narrator, were entertaining representatives of the new middle class, seeking to escape the dreary world of offices and desks during weekend trips out into the countryside. Jerome's heroes proved so popular that he brought them back for an equally picaresque bicycle tour of Germany, an adventure recorded in Three Men on the Bummel. The new Introduction by Jeremy Lewis describes the social context of the two books and the remarkable life of their author.« less