History Main / ThreeMeninaBoat

[[redirect:Literature/ThreeMenInABoat]]

''[[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/308 Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)]]'' is a comic novel written by Jerome K. Jerome. Published in 1889, it is a humorous account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford.

The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who went on to become a senior manager in Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional, but "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This is just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.

Because of the overwhelming success of ''Three Men in a Boat'', Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled ''[[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2183 Three Men on the Bummel]]''.
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Provides examples of:

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking
-> The sight of those [private property] notice-boards rouses every evil instinct in my nature. I feel I want to tear each one down, and hammer it over the head of the man who put it up, until I have killed him, and then I would bury him, and put the board up over the grave as a tombstone.

-> I mentioned these feelings of mine to Harris, and he said he had them worse than that. He said he not only felt he wanted to kill the man who caused the board to be put up, but that he should like to slaughter the whole of his family and all his friends and relations, and then burn down his house. This seemed to me to be going too far, and I said so to Harris; but he answered:

-> “Not a bit of it. Serve ’em all jolly well right, and I’d go and sing comic songs on the ruins.”

And of course, it's the comic songs that bother Jerome the most. Then again, Harris is one of the worlds most [[DreadfulMusician Dreadful Musicians]].
* CanineCompanion - The chaps have the canine delinquent Montmorency.
* DoomItYourself - Uncle Podger seems prone to this, as illustrated by the story of his hanging a painting.
* DreadfulMusician - When people laugh at Harris's comic songs, he takes it as a compliment. But it's not the lyrics that hey are laughing at.
* EpicFail - Uncle Podger again. There are a few more examples of his approach to doing things in the sequel.
* EverythingsLouderWithBagpipes
* {{Gaslighting}} - Done by Jerome and Harris to George in Prague in the sequel ''Three Men on the Bummel''. In an attempt to stop him drinking so much, they exploit the fact that the Czechs have been putting up temporary statues of King Wenceslas all around the city to work out where the real one would look best, convincing George he's having drunken hallucinations.
* TheGayNineties
* GiftedlyBad - Harris singing comic songs. He appears to be capable of single-handedly giving the pianist a nervous breakdown.
* HaveAGayOldTime - Use of the word ''queer'' to describe seasickness. However, in many ways, the book seems undated to the modern reader, with the jokes seeming fresh and witty even today.
* HorribleCampingTrip - well, occasionally. Most of the time, they are enjoying themselves just fine, but some days are quite bad.
* HypocriticalHumour: Quite a bit. In one passage the author breaks into an indignant speech against motor boats, and how they are unsportsmanlike and polluting, and make waves that flood your boat, and how those "boatsmen", who have them being towed by motorboats, are the shame of the honest boat-folk, and gives advise on how you should take every chance to annoy them by getting in their way. Later a friend with a motor boat offers to take ''them'' on a tow, and, naturally, before long he breaks into another indidnant speach about those clumsy assholes on their stupid oarboats, who cannot see where they are going and get in the way of respectable people and how he'd like to murder them all.
* InducedHypochondria - Jerome does this to himself after accidentally reading an entire medical dictionary, and becoming convinced that he has ''every'' disease described in it (except housemaid's knee).
* InWhichATropeIsDescribed
* LemonyNarrator
* TheMindIsAPlaythingOfTheBody - There's a passage several pages long detailing how a person's mood depends entirely on what he is eating, and what this food is doing to the body.
* MoodWhiplash - Because of the above the serious and somewhat sentimental passages sometimes seem a distraction to the comic novel. Many others are a leftover from the book's original concept, where it was a straight travel guide.
* NoCanOpener - which leads to...
* NoodleIncident - we never know what ''exactly'' happened when J hitted the can with the tree for the first time. We know only that Harris got a superficial wound, while the straw hat saved George's life.
* StopDrowningAndStandUp - J describes this happening in a story about getting up early to swim on vacation.
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-> The sight of those notice-boards rouses every evil instinct in my nature. I feel I want to tear each one down, and hammer it over the head of the man who put it up, until I have killed him, and then I would bury him, and put the board up over the grave as a tombstone.

* InducedHypochondria: Jerome does this to himself after accidentally reading an entire medical dictionary, and becoming convinced that he has ''every'' disease described in it (except housemaid's knee).

* MoodWhiplash - Because of the above the serious and somewhat sentimental passages sometimes seem a distraction to the comic novel. Many others are a leftover from the book's original concept; see WhatCouldHaveBeen below.

* WhatCouldHaveBeen - 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 in a sort of reverse CreatorBreakdown, because Jerome had just got married, and was too upbeat.

* DoomItYourself - Uncle Podger's escapade.

* MoodWhiplash - Because of the above the serious and somewhat sentimental passages sometimes seem a distraction to the comic novel.

''Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)'' is a comic novel written by Jerome K. Jerome. Published in 1889, it is a humorous account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford.

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''.

* NoCanOpener

* GiftedlyBad - George singing comic songs. He appears to be capable of single-handedly giving the pianist a nervous breakdown.

* {{Gaslighting}} - Done by Jerome and Harris to George in Prague in the sequel ''Three Men on the Bummel''. In an attempt to stop him drinking so much, they exploit the fact that the Czechs have been putting up temporary statues of King Wenceslas all around the city to work out where the real one would look best, convincing George he's having drunken hallucinations.

* HaveAGayOldTime - Use of the word ''queer'' to describe seasickness. However, in many ways, the book seems undated to the modern reader, with the jokes seeming fresh and witty even today.
* WhatCouldHaveBeen - 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 in a sort of reverse CreatorBreakdown, because Jerome had just got married, and was too upbeat.
* MoodWhiplash - Because of the above the serious and somewhat sentimental passages sometimes seem a distraction to the comic novel.