Three Men in a Boat

About This Book

Published in 1889, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is a comic novel by Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927). Three friends — Jerome (known as J.), George, and Harris — along with a fox terrier named Montmorency, take a boating holiday up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford. What follows is a string of misadventures, digressions, and observations on English life delivered in a voice of deadpan irony that has kept the book in print for over a century. Jerome based the trip on actual outings he made with friends, though the comic exaggeration transforms everyday annoyances into small masterpieces of absurdity. Three Men in a Boat is one of the most popular humorous works in the English language. The novel is in the public domain.

Excerpt

There were four of us — George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking and talking about how bad we were — bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.— Opening of Three Men in a Boat

What Critics Say

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

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