Novel
Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome · 1889
Opening lines
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.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Three friends from London, convinced they are ill, decide, at the suggestion of one of them, to row up the Thames for a fortnight, with a fox terrier who asked for nothing. The narrator remembers reading a medical treatise and finding in himself every disease but one. He unpacks and repacks his bag over a toothbrush, the canvas stretched over the boat resists their efforts, a tin of pineapple refuses to open, and every lock or riverside village calls up a memory or a digression.
Context
The text first appeared as a serial in the monthly Home Chimes, from 1888 to 1889, then in volume form from Arrowsmith, in Bristol, in 1889. The three friends are real, the author being one of them along with George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, and the book draws on their boating outings. Its success soon crossed borders: a Russian translation appeared as early as 1894, and in 1902 the author had to write to The Times to disown books published in Russia under his name.
Who it is for
A short narrative made up of digressions, translated into French as early as 1894 and retranslated several times, most recently in 1989.
Prizes and reception
Two hundred thousand copies in Britain in twenty years, more than a million pirated editions in America, and not a penny for the author on the latter.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.