Jerome's meandering narrative of a boating trip up the Thames from London is mostly slapstick, of course, but it has an offbeat intimacy and charm which has made it live on as a fringe classic. Highbrow critics wrote it off at the time, including Oscar Wilde, who dismissed it as "vulgar without being funny". Nevertheless it goes from printing to printing and is an enduring testimony that the late Victorian era could be just as jolly and fun-loving as the Edwardian one which followed. The second work is not much more than a pendant to the first, though its account of a bicycle tour in imperial Germany has some surprisingly acute comments, as well as the ritual chapters of farce and the predictable insularity of its outlook.