Jerome's comic masterpiece — and one of the best-known classics of English humor — follows the misadventures of 3 bungling, Victorian-era bachelors who take off on a rowing excursion up the Thames. Their disastrous struggles with camping equipment, meal preparation, and rampant hypochondria trumpet simple truths that still resonate today. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel.