Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel

When J. the narrator George Harris and Montmorency the dog embark on their amusing misadventures they can hardly foresee the difficulties that would arise from the use of tow ropes incorrect weather forecasts fictitious sicknesses butter pats and tins of pineapple pieces. Three Men in a Boat was condemned as vulgar by the literary establishment while capturing the spirit of the day. Jeromes book was especially well-liked by the clerking classes who yearned to be free from that fretful haste that vehement striving that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life. The expansion of education and the rise in office workers created a new mass readership. It proved to be so well-liked that Jerome brought back his heroes for a tour across Germany by bicycle. Three Men on the Bummel portrays an equally picaresque excursion that is only confined by the requirement of returning back within a set time to the location from which one started despite some astute and in hindsight prophetic assessments of the country.