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
To Say Nothing of the Dog in the dedication: "To Robert A. Heinlein, Who, in "Have Space Suit—Will Travel", first introduced me to Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog"." Ned Henry is a time traveler in 1940 studying Coventry Cathedral after the Coventry Blitz of World War II. He is specifically searching for the location of the "Bishop's bird stump", a MacGuffin that isn't defined by the narrator. The narrator shows confusion explained by "time-lag", the time-travel-induced form of jet lag. He returns unsuccessfully to his time, 2057, at Oxford University. The Bishop's bird stump is needed for