Three Men in a Boat a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. Following the overwhelming success of "Three Men in a Boat", Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled "Three Men on the Bummel" (also known as "Three Men on Wheels", 1900). The story begins by introducing George, Harris, Jerome (always referred to as "J."), and Jerome's dog, named Montmorency. The men are spending an evening in J.'s room, smoking
Three Men on the Bummel the book, and apart from his book, it has not received any widespread use in English. (The first American edition, published by Dodd Mead in 1900, was entitled "Three Men on Wheels".) One of the characters in the book asks, "how would you translate [bummel]," to which the narrator replies, in the very final paragraph of the book: The general style and manner of the book are similar to its predecessor. It is a series of humorous vignettes, each of which builds slowly, through accumulation of layer on layer of detail, through several pages. Jeremy Nicholas calls these "set pieces."