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Mon oncle Bélébon était encore coiffé à l'oiseau royal en 1842, époque où il fut question pour la première fois de faire de moi quelque chose. Je parle de lui d'abord parce qu'il était l'esprit de la famille, au dire de mes deux tantes Kerfily et de l'aumônier des Incurables. Mon oncle Bélébon disait de son côté que l'aumônier des Incurables était une fine mouche et que mes deux tantes Kerfily avaient un sens infaillible. Ce fut là précisément ce qui me donna défiance de mon oncle Bélébon, car aussitôt que ma tante Kerfily-Bel-¿il disait blanc, ma tante Kerfily-Nougat criait noir avec une voix d'oiseau qu'elle avait. Or, comment le noir et le blanc peuvent-ils avoir raison tous deux à la fois?Mon oncle Bélébon ne se faisait jamais à lui-même de ces questions indiscrètes. C'était le despotisme incarné: un bien brave homme, à part cela, et qui avait des boutons d'agate à son habit marron. Dans la nuit des temps, il avait été officier de marine, mais sans jamais monter à bord d'aucun vaisseau. «Le métier de marin, disait-il parfois après dîner, est semé de dangers sans nombre. On n'y est séparé de la mort que par une mince planche!»

Il avait reçu au baptême les prénoms de Jérôme-Épaminondas- Annibal. Son parrain, Jérôme Ladouceur, avait la passion des noms sonores. Pour lui, la valeur d¿un homme se mesurait de prime abord sur l¿ampleur du nom. Aussi, longtemps avant la naissance d¿Annibal, il avait fait de longues et profondes réflexions. ¿ Si c¿est une fille, se disait-il, je ne me mêle de rien ; mon frère pourra prendre un autre parrain et chercher un nom de son choix. Mais, si c¿est un garçon, ah ! par exemple, je tiens à mes droits ; je veux lui donner un nom qui dise quelque chose, et faire de mon neveu un homme dont sa famille soit fière, et dont le monde parle un peu. Il ne faut pas qüil ait une de ces existences ternes et monotones qui se passent dans l¿obscurité et s¿éteignent dans l¿oubli. Et, pour cela, il doit porter un nom qui commande l¿attention, car je veux faire de lui un sujet digne de commander, morbleu !

In Pollyanna Grows Up we follow the titular character as she ¿grows up¿ through a story told in two connected parts. The first part takes place in Boston when she is age 13, having just been rehabilitated from severe injuries sustained in an automobile accident. As she leaves the hospital, she is sent to stay with a nearby dowager, who has long withdrawn into grief, pining for her lost nephew. Pollyanna is to be her ¿cure.¿ After leaving Boston, Pollyanna leaves the country with her Aunt Polly and doesn¿t return to Vermont until she is 20 years old.While in Boston, Pollyanna observes her host¿s isolation and depression, which sits in stark contrast with the opulence of her home and her material wealth. Meanwhile, naive, relentlessly positive, literal-minded Pollyanna, often oblivious to the structure of society around her, slowly comes to understand the dire, grinding poverty, isolation, and alienation that turn-of-the-century Boston was also home to. Human connection is a central theme of the book and Pollyanna begins to engage with broader cultural and moral questions of her society before departing the country.In the second half of the book, Pollyanna acts as host to the friends she made in Boston. As such, she reconnects with them and puts them in touch with her friends and family in Vermont. As a part of growing up, Pollyanna must now address questions of how these relationships might change as her age and social status change. She must reconcile the sense of obligation she feels with her desires, and with the wants and needs of those around her. Old relationships are expanded, and new relationships are formed (or revealed) with each, in the end, more connected to all.

Thornton W. Burgess was an American naturalist and the author of dozens of books for children, the most enduring of which are Old Mother West Wind and The Burgess Bird Book for Children. Burgess was a passionate twentieth-century conservationist who dedicated his life to teaching children and their families about the importance of the natural life of the northern North American forest.The Green Meadow Stories compilation is made up of four distinct but entwined tales: those of Happy Jack Squirrel, Mrs. Peter Rabbit, Bowser the Hound, and Old Granny Fox. Through the adventures of these focal characters readers are introduced to the wider territory of the Green Meadows, the Green Forest, and the Smiling Pond as well as to the animals¿ Great World.The animals of Burgess¿s stories are anthropomorphized, undoubtedly, but not caricatured: these are not the twee creatures of Disney cartoons. Their behaviour is explained in ways that would be understandable to a human child¿this is fiction, after all¿but Burgess¿s ¿little people of the forest¿ are not simply humans dressed in fur and feathers. The original illustrations in Burgess¿s books (by Harrison Cady, not reproduced in this edition) show the animals wearing clothes, but Burgess¿s own descriptions of animals are more natural and metaphorical, and less fantastic. For example, he describes Chatterer the Red Squirrel, ¿who always wears a red coat with vest of white,¿ a compact way of communicating the look of a squirrel that many of today¿s children will never have seen with their own eyes. Less pleasantly, it is Peter Rabbit¿s fur and flesh that is rent when Hooty the Owl tears Peter¿s ¿coat¿ one night on the Old Pasture.Burgess has tremendous respect for the creatures he depicts, as well as for their natural home. While the presentation of the Green Meadow is hardly ¿Nature, red in tooth and claw,¿ it is surprisingly unsentimental. Peter Rabbit, for example, lives a highly anxious life under threat from the many predators who would enjoy having him for dinner; similarly, Happy Jack Squirrel experiences days and nights of terror when Shadow the Weasel discovers Happy Jack¿s home and hunts him relentlessly. During a long, hard winter, Granny Fox and Reddy Fox come close to starving, and Old Man Coyote leads Bowser the Hound on a dangerous chase that may result in one or the other dying. Despite other fanciful, sentimental elements of storytelling, Burgess does not sugarcoat prey/predator relationships or the precarity of wild animals¿ lives.Burgess is a clear conservationist in his representations of hunting. The animals are highly aware of hunters and their ¿dreadful guns.¿ It is a notable moment in this collection when Farmer Brown¿s Boy decides he will no longer use his gun to harm the little people of the Green Meadow and the Green Forest. The stories are also notable in their detailed representation of a largely intact forest, something few children in the twenty-first century will experience.On the other hand, these are books for children, and they contain plenty of sweetness and light. Animal pairings¿such as when Peter Rabbit meets the dainty Little Miss Fuzzytail, the future Mrs. Rabbit¿are vague but sentimental and soon lead to proud new families of Rabbits, Ducks, Deer, and Owls. The ¿little people¿ celebrate the arrival of each spring¿s babies, mark each other¿s new relationships and homes, play together, and even help each other survive. They laugh, tease, and trick each other¿a fanciful interpretation of animal behaviour that could lead to a reader¿s life-long fascination with, and respect for, forest creatures¿and for generations of readers, they did just that.

¿Call me Ishmael¿ says Moby Dick¿s protagonist, and with this famous first line launches one of the acclaimed great American novels. Part adventure story, part quest for vengeance, part biological textbook and part whaling manual, Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The story follows Ishmael as he abandons his humdrum life on shore for an adventure on the waves. Finding the whaler Pequod at harbour in Nantucket, he signs up for a three year term without meeting the Captain of the ship, a mysterious figure called Ahab. It is only well into the voyage that Ahab¿s thirst for vengeance against the eponymous white whale Moby Dick¿and the consequences¿become clear.The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years travelling the world in the early 1840s. Herman used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopaedic quality at times. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships¿ provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that¿s being painted.Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.

Written in 1881, when melodrama and farce were still at their peak of popularity, Ibsen¿s Ghosts is a three-act tragedy that explores uncomfortable, even forbidden themes. It is also a highly critical commentary on the morality of the day. The play centers around the widow of a prominent Norwegian sea captain whose son returns home and, with tragic consequences, revives the ghosts of the past that she has long labored to put to rest.Ghosts immediately became a source of controversy for its inclusion of topics like venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, and it was banned from being performed in England for many years. Its arrival signals a shift in the nature of theatre and, despite negative criticism, it was translated into other languages and performed in Sweden, Germany, and New York within a few years of its debut. It stands now as one of the works considered to have ushered in the era of modern drama.

Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, and editor whose work brought attention to the struggles of Victorian England¿s lower classes. His writings provided a candid portrait of the eräs poor and served as inspiration for social change.Great Expectations, Dickens¿ thirteenth novel, was first published in serial form between 1860 and 1861 and is widely praised as the author¿s greatest literary accomplishment.The novel follows the life, relationships, and moral development of an orphan boy named Pip. The novel begins when Pip encounters an escaped convict whom he helps and fears in equal measure. Pip¿s actions that day set off a sequence of events and interactions that shape Pip¿s character as he matures into adulthood.The vivid characters, engaging narrative style, and universal themes of Great Expectations establish this novel as a timeless literary classic, and an engaging portrait of Victorian life.

Germinal, named after the spring month in the French Republican Calendar, is often considered to be Zoläs masterpiece. The book follows Étienne Lantier, a young man whose career as a railway worker is abruptly cut short after he attacks a superior. He arrives in Montsou, a coal mining town in the north of France, to begin a new life in a different industry. And the only industry around is mining coal.Étienne quickly befriends the locals as he embraces his new life in the mines, but the abject poverty of the miners shocks him, and he soon begins reading about socialism. When the owners of the mine conspire to lower the miners¿ wages, Étienne seizes the opportunity and convinces the town to strike.Zoläs depiction of the mining town is shockingly bleak in its detail. He spent months researching the conditions of real-life miners, even going so far as pose as a government official so that he could descend into a mine personally. His encounter with a mining horse¿brought underground as a foal to haul coal, never to see the light of day again¿affected him so much that he wrote the animal into the plot. Montsou itself is a fully-realized town, with families and characters leading interconnected and nuanced lives across generations: lives so destitute, grueling, and filthy that Zola had to repeatedly defend his work against claims of hyperbole.Ultimately, the novel was a rallying cry for the workers of the world in an era when communist and socialist ideas were beginning to spread amongst the impoverished working class. The shabby but good-hearted inhabitants of Montsou, so blatantly oppressed by the bourgeois mine owners, are a blank slate for workers of any industry to identify with, and identify they did: Germinal inspired socialist causes for decades after its publication, with crowds chanting ¿Germinal!¿ at Zoläs funeral.

Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Indian (and more specifically Bengali) literary history, Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian¿indeed, the first person outside Europe¿to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely in recognition of his ¿spiritual offering of songs,¿ Gitanjali.Tagore himself translated the poems from the original Bengali, taking many liberties in the process. His English translation is rightly recognized as a work distinct from the Bengali original, consisting of major revisions, many elisions, and many poems originally published in other collections.Tagore¿s lyrical simplicity, vivid imagery, and themes of nature, spirituality, death, and transcendence combine to produce a truly unique, powerfully moving work of thoughtful beauty. For many who read it, Tagore¿s words in Song XCVI ring true: ¿What I have seen is unsurpassable. I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light, and thus I am blessed.¿

P. G. Wodehouse¿s short stories are often set in the salons and townhouses of England, but he also wrote about golf, returning again and again to one of his favorite sports.Set against a background of the unique and often quirky world of golf in the early 1920s, Wodehouse produced a great collection of stories chronicling the loves and lives of golf fanatics. Starting around 1919 he wrote these golf stories regularly for both American and English magazines, and published two collections: The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922) and The Heart of a Goof (1926). He continued to write golf stories until the mid 1960s.Most of these stories are narrated by The Oldest Member, a talkative type who frames most of the stories by trapping other members of the club into listening to his ¿words of wisdom.¿The stories in this collection are ordered by the date they first appeared in magazine form, and are mostly from the English editions¿the main difference from the U.S. editions being the names and locations of the golf clubs.

Although known for her later experiments with style and structure, Virginia Woolf set out in her early novels to master the traditional form. Her second novel, Night and Day, presents itself as a seemingly conventional marriage plot, complete with love triangles, broken engagements, and unrequited affections. Beneath these conventional trappings, however, the book¿s deeper concerns are resolutely subversive. The main characters¿a quartet of friends and would-be lovers¿come together, pull apart, and struggle to reconcile socially-prescribed norms of love and marriage with their own beliefs and ambitions.

Othello was written in 1603 and first performed in 1604. The underlying story is based on ¿A Moorish Captain,¿ one of the stories in Cinthiös Gli Hecatommithi, written in 1565.Othello is a Moorish black general in Venice, known for his military prowess. He elopes with Desdemona, a noble Venetian lady, who is the daughter of Brabantio, a senator. When Othello promotes Cassio to be his lieutenant over Iago, his ensign, the evil Iago gets his revenge by alleging an affair between Cassio and Desdemona, sowing doubt in the mind of Othello.This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright¿s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Gladiator, first published in 1930, tells the story of Hugo Danner, who is given superhuman speed, endurance, strength, and intelligence by his father as an experiment in creating a better human. We follow Hugo throughout his life viewed from his perspective, from childhood, when Hugo first discovers he¿s different from others, to adulthood, as Hugo tries to find a positive outlet for his abilities around the time of the first World War.Gladiator has been made into a 1938 comedy movie, and is thought to be the inspiration for the Superman comic books¿though this has not been confirmed.

First published in 1848, Mary Barton is Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel. The story is set in the English city of Manchester during the 1830s and 1840s and deals heavily with the difficulties faced by the Victorian lower class.

First published in 1823, these memoirs were written by the first lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Madame Campan became close to the Queen during her 18 years in service. Her memoirs divulge details of the daily life at the royal court as well as recount the events of the Revolution from the royal family's perspective.

Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, was American political economist Henry George¿s most popular book. It explores why the economy of the mid-to-late 1800s had seen a simultaneous economic growth and growth in poverty. The book¿s appeal was in its balance of moral and economic arguments, challenging the popular notion that the poor, through uncontrolled population growth, were responsible for their own woes. Inspired by his years living in San Francisco and his own experience with privation, George argues instead that poverty had grown due to the increasing speculation and monopolization of land, as landowners had captured the increases in growth, investment, and productivity through the rising cost of rent.To solve this, George proposes the complete taxation of the unimproved value of land, thus returning the value of land, created through location, to the community. This solution would incentivize individuals to use the land they own productively and remove the tendency to speculate upon land¿s increasing value. George¿s argument was profoundly liberal, as individuals retain the right to own land and enjoy the profits generated from production upon it.Progress and Poverty was hugely popular in the 1890s, being outsold only by the Bible. It inspired the Single Tax Movement, and influenced a wide range of intellectuals and policymakers in the early 1900s including Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill.

First published in 1761, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph is a love story as well as an indictment of eighteenth-century cultural mores regarding marriage. The story begins with the engagement of Miss Sidney. But when she discovers her fiance's previous affair and that the woman is pregnant, she breaks off the engagement. Miss Sidney moves on and marries another man, but neither her ex-fiance nor his mistress disappear from her life completely.

First published in 1871, Little Men the sequel to Little Women. It continues where Little Women left off set at the school established by Jo and her professor husband, Fritz Bhaer. Jo is the catalyst moving the education process along, the glue holding the school together and the engineer studying and solving the human problems that surface when a multitude of students with widely divergent backgrounds come together.

Growing bored while accompanying his Cambridge chum Mike on a cricket tour of the United States, Psmith seeks adventure in New York City. He finds it in the form of the weekly newspaper Cosy Moments, a completely bland and inoffensive publication at which, through charm and sheer force of personality, Psmith appoints himself an unpaid subeditor, fires the entire contributing staff, and embarks on a crusade against the slumlords, gangs, and boxing managers of his holiday destination.Psmith, Journalist is the third of Wodehouse¿s Psmith novels, and is a marked departure from the author¿s usual settings and themes. It presents a very strong social justice theme with direct, harsh condemnation of exploitation, corruption, racism, and inequality in early-twentieth century America, and its themes continue to resonate with readers a century later.The story first appeared in The Captain magazine from October 1909 to February 1910, and was first published as a book, including eight illustrations, by A & C Black in 1915. This Standard Ebook is based on the 1923 edition by the same publisher.

Surprisingly timeless and under the guise of ¿Christian Mysticism,¿ Underhill describes in 1914 what could rightly be called ¿secular mindfulness¿ today. Evelyn Underhill doesn¿t use much Christian terminology, instead preferring to use words that may be considered ¿new age.¿ If one can get past the terminology, the ¿Practical Mysticism¿ allows anyone to explore the mystical aspects of their own worldview without necessarily betraying their prior deeply-held beliefs.Practical Mysticism is not a guidebook for mystical practice, though it does provide some tips along the way. What it does give is an introduction and apology for the sufficiently motivated; those that see (or want to see) the world in a different way.

The publication of Lytton Strachey¿s Eminent Victorians in 1918 was a tremendous success. In it, Strachey looked at four iconic figures of the Victorian Age and punctured the hagiographical illusions surrounding them. It seems only fitting that he should follow up in 1921 with a similarly unsentimental but fair biography of the person at the pinnacle of that era, Queen Victoria herself.Thoroughly researched, with his references documented in hundreds of footnotes, Strachey looks at the life of the young woman who, when she was born, was by no means certain to become the British monarch. He also spends considerable time on her consort, Prince Albert, who, in Strachey¿s telling, develops from a careless youth to becoming a truly remarkable and effective figure in British society, while continuing to be generally perceived as an outsider.Strachey¿s sardonic and witty style makes this account of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert an entertaining and very informative read.

Published in July 1814, Mansfield Park is the story of Fanny Price who has been raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle as charity to her mother who married poorly. Treated as inferior by everyone except her cousin Edmund, Fanny's gratitude toward Edmund secretly grows into love. As suitors and other lovers come into the picture, the plot thickens and emotions run high in true Austen style. This ebook is also part of The Complete Works of Jane Austen.

The Path to Rome is British-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc¿s first travelogue. It describes the pilgrimage he took to Rome as the result of a vow he made while visiting his hometown of Toul, in Lorraine, France. In his own copy of the book, dated May 29, 1904, he notes: ¿I wrote this book for the glory of God.¿Belloc walked ¿two and a half hundred leagues¿ to Rome, over twenty-two days, and arrived in time to hear Mass on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. As he walks, he quickly discovers the difficulty of keeping every vow he made before starting, as the days are long, the mountains steep, and his finances stressed. But the book is far more than a simple travelogue; alongside the narrative of the journey, Belloc wanders into topics as varied as the art of writing, life in the military, his Catholic faith, the middle class, literary criticism, music, poetry, and more. His unique politics and personality shine in his many digressions and asides.The Path to Rome sold very well, and many critics have viewed it as the book that made Belloc¿s name. His great friend G. K. Chesterton said of it in The World: ¿The Path to Rome is the product of the actual and genuine buoyancy and thoughtlessness of a rich intellect. ¿¿

Man and Wife is the ninth novel by Wilkie Collins, and was published in serial form in 1870. Like many of his other novels it has a complex plot and tackles social issues, in this case the then-lax state of the marriage laws, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. As always, Collins deals carefully but frankly with human personal behavior. To avoid offending Victorian morals too greatly, much is implied rather than stated outright. Nevertheless, even dealing with such matters at all led to his novels being derided as ¿sensation fiction¿ by his critics. By today¿s standards, of course, they wouldn¿t even raise an eyebrow.In Man and Wife, the main character Anne Silvester has fallen pregnant to a muscular and handsome, but boorish man, Geoffrey Delamayn, to whom she is not married. She is working as a governess at a house in Scotland. Anne arranges to meet Delamayn secretly at a garden party and angrily demands that he fulfill his promise to marry her, that very day. He very reluctantly agrees to a secret, private marriage, knowing that a public marriage would badly affect his inheritance prospects. How is the marriage to be arranged quickly but kept quiet? Anne has a plan based on her understanding of the looseness of the marriage laws in Scotland. Naturally, of course, things go badly wrong with this plan and many complexities arise.Collins is deeply critical of the state of contemporary marriage laws, both in how loosely they were framed, and in how little power over their own lives they gave to women once they were married, even if married to a brutal man. He also uses this novel to denounce the worship of sporting heroes and the obsession with physical prowess rather than mental superiority as a primary indication of male virtue.Though not as popular as his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Man and Wife received a good critical reception when it was released and was a commercial success.

The last Lecoq novel goes back to the beginning, to Monsieur Lecoq¿s first case, the case that began his reputation as a master of detection, master of disguise, and master of detail. The case begins simply: Lecoq and several other policemen come upon a crime as it¿s being committed. Three men are dead and the killer is in custody. But who is he? Lecoq and his companion officer spend months trying to figure it out, to no avail. Lecoq finally goes to visit his old mentor in order to gain some insight.The scene then changes to some fifty years previous; in the aftermath of Waterloo, some noblemen return from exile. One of them insults the character of a local who has acted honorably on the nobleman¿s behalf, and the remainder of the novel is devoted to how those few minutes end up unravelling the lives of everyone present, and many who aren¿t.Gaboriau again demonstrates his ability to mix detective mystery and Dickensian drama, and foreshadows the style of the first two novels of his more famous English cousin in detection.

Greenmantle is the second of John Buchan¿s novels to feature Richard Hannay, a Scottish intelligence office in the British army, and as such is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps.The book gives the account of Hannay and his associate¿s separate journeys through war-torn Europe to Constantinople to thwart an uprising that is poised to throw the Middle East, India, and North Africa into disarray, changing the course of the war.The book was popular when first published and although it has never been made into a film, the director Alfred Hitchcock was said to prefer Greenmantle to The Thirty-Nine Steps, and considered filming it on several occasions.

Following the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the ward of Jack Tanner and Roebuck Ramsden; Jack is a childhood friend, author of The Revolutionist¿s Handbook, and descendant of Don Juan, while Roebuck Ramsden is a respectable friend of her father¿s entirely opposed to Jack¿s philosophy. Also in mourning are Octavius Robinson, who is openly in love with Ann, and his sister Violet, who is secretly pregnant. So begins a journey that will take them across London, Europe, and to Hell.George Bernard Shaw wrote Man and Superman between 1901 and 1903. It was first performed in 1905 with the third act excised; a part of that third act, Don Juan in Hell, was performed in 1907. The full play was not performed in its entirety until 1915.Shaw explains that he wrote Man and Superman after being challenged to write on the theme of Don Juan. Once described as Shaw¿s most allusive play, Man and Superman refers to Nietzsche¿s concept of the Übermensch. It combines Nietzsche¿s argument that humanity is evolving towards a ¿superman¿ with the philosophy of Don Juan as a way to present his conception of society: namely, that it is women who are the driving force behind natural selection and the propagation of the species. To this end, Shaw includes as an appendix The Revolutionist¿s Handbook and Pocket Companion as written by the character Jack Tanner.