THREE MEN ON THE BUMMEL

`I did not intend to write a funny book, at first` wrote Jerome J. Jerome of Three Men in a Boat, which has since become a comic classic. When J. the narrator, George, Harris and Montmorency the dog set off on their hilarious misadventures, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts, imaginary illnesses, butter pats and tins of pineapple chunks. Denounced as vulgar by the literary establishment, Three Men in a Boat nevertheless caught the spirit of the times. The expansion of education and the increase in office workers created a new mass readership, and Jerome`s book was especially popular among the `clerking classes` who longed to be `free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.`So popular did it prove that Jerome reunited his heroes for a bicycle tour of Germany. Despite some sharp, and with hindsight, prophetic observations of the country, Three Men on the Bummel describes an equally picaresque journey constrained only `by the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started`.