In fact at various points the narrator complains about the Thames becoming too busy with pleasure craft, with thousands of skiffs and rowboats and his particular bete noire, the steam pleasure cruiser. As a result a new fashion had been developing since the 1870s for boating as a leisure activity. One answer is that the book caught the spirit of a moment when commercial activity on the Thames had all but died out, almost the entire barge traffic which dominated it having been decimated by the railway revolution of the 1840s and 1850s. Despite being slapdash in ‘plot’ and very uneven in tone, it was wildly popular upon publication, has sold solidly ever since and been translated into loads of languages. It describes the lazy dawdling progress of three late-Victorian ‘chaps’ on a 2-week boating holiday up the River Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back again. Three Men in A Boat is routinely included in any list of the funniest books ever written in any language. George said: ‘Let’s go up the river.’ He said we should have fresh air, exercise and quiet the constant change of scene would occupy our minds (including what there was of Harris’s) and the hard work would give us a good appetite, and make us sleep well.
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