Joan Allway means to reform the world through journalism and finds the world has arrangements of its own — a married politician, a war, and a slum parish. Jerome was orphaned at fifteen and worked as a railway clerk, a schoolmaster and an actor before Three Men in a Boat, which he meant as a serious travel guide; this 1919 novel is his most earnest book, written by a man who had driven an ambulance in France at fifty-six.