Three Men in a Boat

Language: English (US)

A comic travelogue in which three friends, George, Harris and the narrator J. ("to say nothing of the dog", Montmorency), take a two-week boating holiday up the River Thames from Kingston to Oxford. Their string of mishaps and digressions, interspersed with mock-serious history of the riverside towns they pass, made the book an immediate popular success on its publication in 1889. Public domain in the EU (author died 1927). Source: Project Gutenberg.

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PREFACE.

_The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style_, _or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys_, _as in its simple truthfulness_. _Its pages form the record of events that really happened_. _All that has been done is to colour them_; _and_, _for this_, _no extra charge has been made_. _George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals_, _but things of flesh and blood—especially George_, _who weighs about twelve stone_. _Other works may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size_; _but_, _for hopeless and incurable veracity_, _nothing yet discovered can surpass it_. _This_, _more than all its other charms_, _will_, _it is felt_, _make the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader_; _and will lend additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches_.

LONDON, _August_, 1889.

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