This volume stands as the only available critical edition of two of the most popular classics in English literature. Three Men in a Boat describes a comic expedition by middle-class Victorians up the Thames to Oxford, providing along the way brilliant snap-shots of London´s playground in the late 1880s. In Three Men on the Bummel, the three Englishmen escape from the claustrophobia of suburban life some ten years later to go on a cycling tour in the Black Forest of Germany.