Jerome K. Jerome - Three Men in a Boat (Penguin Classics)

THREE MEN IN A BOAT

JEROME K. JEROME was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, in 1859, and educated at Marylebone Grammar School. He left school aged fourteen to become a railway clerk, the first of a long line of jobs which included acting, teaching and journalism. He spent some time touring with various theatrical companies and lodged for a while in Tavistock Place in London with his friend George Wingrave, who later became the model for George in Three Men in A Boat. His first book, On Stage and Off, a collection of humorous pieces about the theatre, was published in 1885, and was followed in 1886 with a collection of sketches entitled The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. After the commercial success of this volume Jerome took up writing and journalism as a profession. He married in 1888 and settled in the following year in Chelsea Gardens in London, where he wrote his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat. Its sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, appeared in 1900 and describes a hilarious cycling tour through Germanys Black Forest.

In 1892 Jerome had, with some friends, founded The Idler, an illustrated monthly magazine which published humorous work by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. When the magazine folded, Jerome turned to the theatre again and became well-known as a playwright: The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), a sentimental moral fable set in Bloomsbury, enjoyed a long and successful run in Londons theatres. During the First World War he served as an ambulance driver in France. His eventful life is recorded in his autobiography My Life and Times, published in 1926. He died in 1927.

JEREMY LEWIS worked in publishing for much of his life after leaving Trinity College, Dublin, in 1965, and was a director of Chatto & Windus for ten years. He was Deputy Editor of the London Magazine from 1991 to 1994, and is now the Commissioning Editor of the Oldie. He has written two volumes of autobiography, Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits, and edited The Vintage Book of Office Life. His authorized biography of Cyril Connolly was published by Jonathan Cape in 1997 and his biography of Tobias Smollett was published in 2003. He is currently working on a biography of Allen Lane for Penguin. The Secretary of the R. S. Surtees Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is married with two daughters, and lives near Richmond Park.

JEROME K. JEROME

To say nothing of the Dog!

With an Introduction and Notes by

JEREMY LEWIS

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Three Men in a Boat first published 1889
Published in Penguin Books 1957
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2004
1

Introduction and notes copyright Jeremy Lewis, 1999, 2004
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

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EISBN: 9780141907390