In the Library
Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome, 1889
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 65k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith
The Grossmiths do the same thing for the Victorian suburbs, a clerk recording each small humiliation in perfect earnest and never once seeing the joke on himself.
£1.99
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
Grahame takes the same river and the same idle summer days, but gives the boat to a water rat and a mole and lets the Thames turn tender.
£1.99
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens
Dickens does the same thing fifty years earlier, sending a club of hapless gentlemen across England to be rained on, swindled and fed in roughly equal measure.
£1.99
About the book
It begins with a medical dictionary. J. leafs through it in the British Museum and discovers he has every disease in it except housemaid's knee, a diagnosis that sends him, Harris, George and the fox terrier Montmorency up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford for a change of air. What follows is the funniest boat in English. A tin of pineapple defeats three grown men who have forgotten the opener; they batter it with the mast until it looks like nothing in nature. Harris leads a growing crowd into the Hampton Court maze, map in hand, and cannot lead them out. Jerome writes the comedy of men certain of their own competence, and every reader knows the friend who took charge and the self who let him. Between the disasters the river slows, the light goes gold over the water, and the clowning falls quiet for a page, which is why the next joke lands so warmly. Come for the three of them; stay for the kettle that will not boil while anyone is watching it.