Three Men in a Boat Boat" is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog". The trip is
Three Men on the Bummel or Academic fencing. The mensur sword duels are described at length, with little humour, and with Jerome expressing extreme disapproval for the tradition. Jerome would have been aware of Mark Twain's humorous travelogue, "A Tramp Abroad" (1880), based on a walking tour through similar parts of Germany, with extensive comments on the language and culture. "Three Men on the Bummel" follows in this vein. At least one of Jerome's remarks, however, is remarkably prescient: Jeremy Nicholas says that the book is "unfairly chastised as being an ineffectual afterthought" to "Three Men in a Boat", and that "the set pieces (the