Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) illustrated Jerome K. Jerome - The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious, challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest. But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it's the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, or Jerome, K Jerome. Published in 1889, 10 years before Conrad's novel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one, too. "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first," said its author. Humour in literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves. Nevertheless, there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Three Men in a Boat is one of these. Ostensibly the tale of three city clerks on a boating trip, an account that sometimes masquerades, against its will, as a travel guide, Three Men in a Boat hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three 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 several other novels.Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, whilst he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He married in 1888, and the honeymoon was spent on a boat on the Thames; he published Three Men in a Boat soon afterwards. He continued to write fiction, nonfiction and plays over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success.He died in 1927 and his body was cremated.