"Three Men in a Boat," published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. 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 to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 - 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle...

Yth yw an screfor ha'y dhew gothman, Jory ha Harrys, acordys y dhe vos ow lavurya re grev i'n dedhyow dewetha hag indella aga yehes dhe suffra. Yma an try den yonk ytho owth ervira kemeres degolyow in scath war Dhowr Tamys, ow tallath dhyworth Kyngston hag ow mos bys in Resohen. Ymowns y ow kemeres Montmorency, hen yw aga broghky, gansans inwedh. Yma acownt res i'n lyver a'ga aventurs hag a'ga droglabmow war an trumach; yth yw kefys ino inwedh lies whedhel wharthus, rag ensompel, ow tuchya bos prysonys in ker droya Les Hampton, andhiogeleth barometrow ha'n problemow usy ow pertainya dhe...

The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, called Harris in the book, with whom he 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 was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 - 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogueThree Men in a Boat (1889) Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and this comic play.