An ancient river. The journey upstream of some impressionable young men into a mysterious, challenging interior. An inevitable reckoning at the source. Finally, the terrible return to reality. Here, surely, is pre-Edwardian English fiction at its classic finest.
But this is not Heart of Darkness, and the river is not the Congo. Actually, it’s the Thames, and the narrator is not Marlow but J, or Jerome, K Jerome. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) was published in 1889. This was 10 years before Conrad’s novel. It is one of the comic gems in the English language. An accidental one, too. “I did not intend to write a funny book, at first,” said its author.
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