[Factories on the Thames] - Drawing. Public domain image.

A humorous 1889 novel by Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon river Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), was thought to be a serious travel guide but slipped into a brilliant specimen of humour (humor). The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff: the time when commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. This collection is a fictional set of illustration to the book as it was initially intended.