Three Men in a Boat

Three hypochondriac London clerks, J., George, and Harris, along with J.'s fox terrier Montmorency, set off to row up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford and back, certain the fresh air and exercise will cure the vague ailments they have each diagnosed themselves with. Jerome had originally meant to write a straightforward travel guide to the river, pointing out its history and its pretty stretches, but the comic set pieces kept crowding the guidebook material out until the trip's mishaps became the whole point: a tin of pineapple that defeats every tool the men own to open it, Uncle Podger turning a simple job of hanging a picture into a household catastrophe, a night lost trying to find their own camp on the water, an ill advised Irish stew improvised from whatever scraps of food are left in the hamper. None of it amounts to more plot than the river itself provides, one bend and one lock and one riverside town leading to the next, and the three men, no wiser and barely fitter than when they started, simply row back into Kingston at the end much as they left it.

The travel writing that survives sits easily alongside the comedy rather than fighting it, so a reader gets real Thames scenery, actual history of the towns and locks along the way, threaded between the jokes, and the effect is a book that reads as an unhurried companion piece rather than a tightly plotted story. Jerome's prose is conversational and quick, built for reading a chapter at a sitting, and the humor has aged remarkably little for a comic voice now approaching a century and a half old.

The book sold so well after 1889, some two hundred thousand copies of the first edition by 1909, that registered boating on the Thames is said to have risen sharply in the year after it appeared, by some accounts doubling, and it has never once gone out of print since.