The book Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous story by the English writer Jerome K. Jerome about a two-week cruise on the Thames from Kingston to Oxford and back. The author originally intended to write a serious travelogue with descriptions of local history along the route, but the humorous elements eventually got to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages only distracted from the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how timeless it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty in every era.

The protagonist here is Jerome himself, along with two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel, with whom Jerome often went on boat trips. The Montmorency dog ​​is entirely fictitious, but, as Jerome admits, "has evolved from that region of inner consciousness which in all Englishmen contains an element of the dog".