Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat

File:3 Men in a Boat Cover.jpg
Author	Jerome K. Jerome
Language	English
Genre	Comedy novel
Publisher	J. W. Arrowsmith
Publication date	1889
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardback
ISBN	0-7653-4161-1
OCLC	48157386
Followed by	Three Men on the Bummel

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by 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 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 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. 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.

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.

A similar book was published seven years before Jerome's work, entitled Three in Norway (by two of them) by J. A. Lees and W. J. Clutterbuck. It tells of three men on an expedition into the wild Jotunheimen in Norway.

Plot summary

The story begins by introducing George, Harris, 'J.' (the narrator) and Montmorency, the dog. The men are spending an evening in J.'s room, smoking and discussing illnesses they fancy they suffer from. They conclude they are all suffering from 'overwork' and need a holiday. A stay in the country and a sea trip are both considered, then rejected (J. describes the bad experiences had by his brother-in-law and a friend on sea trips). Eventually, the three decide on a boating holiday, up the River Thames, from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford, during which they'll camp, notwithstanding J.'s anecdotes regarding previous mishaps with tents and camping stoves.

They embark the following Saturday. George must go to work that morning ("George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two") so J. and Harris make their way to Kingston by train. They are unable to find the correct train at Waterloo Station (the station's confusing layout was a well-known theme of Victorian comedy) so they bribe a train driver to take his train to Kingston, where they collect their hired boat and start their journey. They meet George later, up-river at Weybridge.

The remainder of the story relates their river journey and the incidents that occur. The book's original purpose as a guidebook is apparent as the narrator describes the passing landmarks and villages such as Hampton Court Palace, Monkey Island, Magna Carta Island and Marlow, and muses upon historical associations of these places. However, he frequently digresses into anecdotes that range from the unreliability of barometers for weather forecasting to the difficulties that may be encountered when learning to play the Scottish bagpipe. The most frequent topics are river pastimes such as fishing and boating and the difficulties they present to the inexperienced and unwary.

The book includes classic comedy set-pieces, such as the story of two drunken men who slide into the same bed in the dark, the plaster of paris trout in chapter 17 and the "Irish stew" in chapter 14 - made by mixing most of the leftovers in the party's food hamper:

I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say.

— Chapter XIV

Reception and history

Title page of 1889 edition

One might have imagined … that the British Empire was in danger. … The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and The Morning Post as an example of the sad results to be expected from the over-education of the lower orders. … I think I may claim to have been, for the first twenty years of my career, the best abused author in England.

— Jerome K Jerome, "My Life and Times" (1926)

The reception by critics varied between luke-warm and hostile. The use of slang was condemned as "vulgar" and the book was derided as written to appeal to 'Arrys and 'Arriets - then-common sneering terms for working-class Londoners who dropped their Hs when speaking. Punch magazine dubbed Jerome " 'Arry K. 'Arry". Modern commentators have praised the humour, but criticized the book's unevenness as the humorous sections are interspersed with more serious passages written in a sentimental, sometimes purple, style.

Yet the book sold in huge numbers. "I pay Jerome so much in royalties," the publisher told a friend, "I cannot imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public must eat them." The first edition was published in August 1889 and remained in print until March 1909 when the second edition was issued. During that time, 202,000 copies were sold. Jerome states in the author's introduction to the 1909 second edition, he'd been told another million copies had been sold in America by pirate printers. The book was translated into many languages. The Russian edition was particularly successful and became a standard school textbook. Jerome later complained in a letter to The Times of Russian books not written by him, published under his name in order to benefit from his success. Since its publication, Three Men in a Boat has never been out of print. It continues to be popular to the current day, with The Guardian ranking it #33 on The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time in 2003, and Esquire ranking it #2 in the 50 Funniest Books Ever in 2009.

The river trip is easy to re-create, thanks to detailed description, and this is sometimes done by fans of the book. Much of the route remains unchanged. For example, all the pubs and inns named are still open.

It was serialised in the popular magazine Home Chimes in 1889.

Science-fiction author Connie Willis paid tribute to Jerome's novel in her own 1997 Hugo Award-winning book To Say Nothing of the Dog. Her time-travelling protagonist also takes an ill-fated voyage on the Thames with two humans and a dog as companions, and encounters George, Harris, 'J' and Montmorency. The title of Willis' novel refers to the full title of the original book, "Three Men in a Boat - To Say Nothing of the Dog!".

Film and television

The story has been turned into several films.

• In 1920 with Lionelle Howard as J., H. Manning Haynes as Harris and Johnny Butt as George.
• In 1933 with William Austin, Edmund Breon, and Billy Milton
• In 1956 with David Tomlinson as J., Jimmy Edwards as Harris and Laurence Harvey as George.
• In 1961, a German film - Drei Mann in einem Boot
• In 1975 BBC produced a version for television adapted by Tom Stoppard, with Tim Curry as J., Michael Palin as Harris, and Stephen Moore as George.
• In 1979, a musical comedy Troye v lodke, ne schitaya sobaki (Russian: Трое в лодке, не считая собаки) filmed by Soviet television, with Andrei Mironov as J., Aleksandr Shirvindt as Harris and Mikhail Derzhavin as George.

An episode of the Victorian detective show Cribb is based on the book.

The BBC made a 1962 musical adaptation for radio, starring Kenneth Horne, Leslie Phillips and Hubert Gregg.

The trip was re-created in 1993 by poet Kim Taplin and companions, resulting in the travelogue Three Women in a Boat and in 2005 by comedians Griff Rhys Jones, Dara Ó Briain, and Rory McGrath, and a very nervous dog called Loli, for the BBC.

See also

• Skiffing
• Locks on the River Thames
• Thames meander, a long-distance journey over all or part of the River Thames

Bibliography

• Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a ship (To Say Nothing of the world). Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1889.
• Jerome, Jerome K., Jeremy Lewis. Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog! and Three Men on the Bummel. Penguin classics. London: Penguin Books, 1999. ISBN 0140437509.

External links

• Three Men in a Boat at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Three Men in a Boat at Project Gutenberg (plain text; edition unknown)
• Three Men in a Boat, audiobook via Librivox
• Three Men in a Boat (illustrated epub)
• IMDb Search
• Fly the journey yourself along the Thames, via Google Earth