'Other works may excel this in depth of thought and
knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in
originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable
vivacity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it.'
(Jerome, Preface to Three Men in a Boat). Three Men in a
Boat describes a comic expedition by middle-class
Victorians up the Thames to Oxford. It provides
brilliant snap-shots of London's playground in the late
1880s, where the fashionable steam-launches of river
swells encounter the hired skiffs of city clerks. The
medley of social vignettes, farcical incidents,
descriptions of river fashions, and reflections on the
Thames's history, is interspersed with humorous
anecdotes told by a natural raconteur. Three Men on the
Bummel records a similar escapade, a break from the
claustrophobia of suburban life some ten years later;
their cycling tour in the Black Forest, at the height of
the new bicycling craze, affords Jerome the opportunity
for a light-hearted scrutiny of German social customs at
a time of increasing general interest in a country that
he loved. This account of middle-aged Englishmen abroad
is spiced with typical Jeromian humour.ABOUT THE SERIES:
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