Here was an audience for a new river guide.

Rowing boats, steam launches, even the occasional gondola: in the Season, up to 800 vessels a day passed through Boulter's Lock near Maidenhead. This was the golden age of the Henley regatta. In late-Victorian England there was a vogue for recreational boating on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. Encouraged by his new wife, Georgina, Jerome intended his account of a boating holiday to be a popular travel guide for a booming market. He was a jobbing freelance literary journalist who had just got married and needed to provide for his wife and family. Jerome K Jerome is more or less forgotten now. Did I omit to say that it also features a dog named Montmorency? In short, like all the finest comic writing, it's about everything and nothing. You could also read it as an unconscious elegy for imperial Britain. What's it all about? Jerome K Jerome would probably say his masterpiece was 'about one hundred and fifty pages', but I would argue that Three Men in a Boat is about the cameraderie of youth, the absurdity of existence, camping holidays, playing truant, comic songs, and the sweet memories of lost time. 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. Nevertheless, there are a few seriously funny books that remain great for all time. Humour in literature is often not taken as seriously as it deserves.

Three men in a boat by jerome k jerome