Three Men in a Boat

Related

• Jerome K. Jerome (1889)

Overview

Three young men, J., George, and Harris, with the dog Montmorency, take a boating holiday up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford, and nothing much happens, at length. The book was intended as a serious guide to the river and became a comic novel almost by accident, as the digressions took over: the hamper, the tin of pineapple with no opener, the uncle who hangs a picture, the maze at Hampton Court, and J.'s discovery, while reading a medical dictionary, that he has every disease in it except housemaid's knee.

Notes

Still funny after a hundred and thirty years, which almost nothing is, and a reminder that the English comic voice, deadpan, self-deprecating, and alert to the gap between how people see themselves and how they are, was fully formed in 1889. The passage about the medical dictionary is the best description of hypochondria ever written and, read now, of what happens to anyone who looks up their symptoms online.

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