Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog - Couverture souple

Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall, Staffordshire in 1859, and educated at Marylebone Grammar School. He left school aged fourteen to become a railway clerk, the first of a long line of jobs which included acting, teaching and journalism. His first book On Stage and Off, a collection of humorous pieces about the theatre, was well received on its publication 1885 and was followed by The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (1890) and its sequel Three Men on the Bummel (1900). In 1892 Jerome, together with some friends, founded The Idler, an illustrated monthly magazine which gained a reputation for publishing humorous work. When the magazine folded, Jerome turned to the theatre again and became well-known as a playwright. He died in 1927.

The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager in Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, 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.