JEROME K. JEROME: Three Men in a Boat, Three Men on the Bummel & Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome. It is a story of three men, accompanied by a dog, as they travel in a boat up the River Thames. 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. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George and Carl with whom he often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional. Because of 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. Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels) was published in 1900, eleven years after his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). The sequel brings back the three companions who figured in Three Men in a Boat, this time on a bicycle tour through the German Black Forest. Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, published in 1886, is a collection of humorous essays by Jerome K. Jerome. It was the author's second published book and it helped establish him as a leading English humorist. While widely considered one of Jerome's better works, and in spite of using the same style as Three Men in a Boat, it was never as popular as the latter. Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859 – 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat.