Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome

BIOGRAPHY
Jerome K. Jerome was born in Walsall, West Midlands, in 1859, but when he was two years old, his family moved to London. He was the fourth child of a family with economic difficulties, but he got some education in a grammar school. His father lost all his money because his mines business failed; then he became an ironmonger and a lay preacher. He died when Jerome was 13, and his wife when he was 15. From the moment he was an orphan, he had to earn his living. He got a job in a railway company, where he worked for four years, sometimes collecting coal.
When he was 18, he tried to be an actor, and then a journalist, but his writings were rejected. He also worked as a teacher, a packer and a solicitor clerk. But finally, when he was 27, he got his Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow published. They were a collection of humorous essays that had appeared in a weekly London magazine.
Two years after this, he got married to a divorced woman with a child, Just after the wedding, they went on their honeymoon on a boat along the River Thames, where he got his inspiration for his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published the next year.
The book is a kind of humorous travelogue, or “riverlogue”, that narrates the adventures of three men and a dog on a boat; they go rowing from a quarter in the south of London to Oxford and back, covering a distance of 125 km going. The book was first intended to be a Thames touristic guide, but then became a farcical novel.
Later he tried the same formula about a journey by bike around Germany in his Three Men on the Bummel, but it wasn’t so successful as the first one. He also wrote several plays.
Three Men in a Boat is a kind of classical book, because its comical situations are still making people laugh today.
He volunteered for the WWI, but he was rejected because he was 55, but then he got a post driving an ambulance in the war.
He died at 68 years old from a cerebral haemorrhage.
 
SUMMARY

This is a group of three friends talking about how unwell they feel. Our hero starts wondering at its reason, and then remembers a time when he read about illnesses and started feeling he had all the illnesses described…, all but one called the housemaid’s knee. He went to see a doctor, and the doctor gave him a prescription to have a healthy life: nice food and exercise. Then he remembers that when he was a child and had a problem with the liver, whose main symptoms were laziness, the best remedy was a nice slap.
The group of friends realizes that they feel unwell because they have worked too much, and so they need a rest. One of them proposes to go on a sea trip, but they discard it because of the sea-sickness. At the end, they decided to go up the river on a boat. And thus our story begins.

 
QUESTIONS
-Try to make a definition for all the diseases mentioned on the first pages of the first chapter.
-How hypochondriacal are you? What illnesses are you most afraid of?
-Why don't we say now “natural death” and we prefer to attribute the death to some malfunction?
-What other road movies, or road trip novels, do you know? And what about “river trip novels or films”?
-For you, what is the best way to relax: what kind of holidays are your favourite? What is your opinion about the “dolce far niente”? According to you, is it possible to have a healthy life without working?
-What do you know about Captain Cook and Sir Francis Drake?

VOCABULARY
rolling deep, seedy, it was borne upon me, listlessness, sift it to the bottom, slight, chum, a good turn, pass away, butted, oblige, hampers, clumps, hearth-rug, charge-sheet, humpy, wan, gunwale, return, berth, somersaults, Sheerness, leeward, second mate, my!, to a “T”, sensible, bally

Three Men in a Boat, film. Wikipedia.

The film

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