Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat, published in full as Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), is a humorous novel by the English writer Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1889. It recounts a two-week boating holiday on the River Thames, from Kingston upon Thames up to Oxford and back, undertaken by three friends named Jerome, George, and Harris, along with Jerome's fox terrier Montmorency. Originally conceived as a straightforward travel guide describing the history and scenery of the riverside towns along the route, the book grew in the writing into a work of comic fiction, in which the historical passages are constantly derailed by farcical anecdotes about tinned pineapple, a badly packed hamper, getting lost in a hedge maze, and other misadventures of the three companions. Despite hostile reviews at the time from critics who objected to its slang and its popularity with working-class readers, the book was an immediate commercial sensation, selling around 202,000 copies in its first twenty years plus an estimated million more through unauthorized American printings, and it has never gone out of print since; it is still frequently ranked among the funniest books ever written in English, including by The Guardian's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.