The narrator recounts the harsh upbringing of his godson Ernest Pontifex, son of a Church of England minister, the oppressive everyday religiosity of his family life, his difficult schooling, his career at Cambridge, his ordination, his floundering attempts to live in a working-class neighbourhood to better be able to bring them the good word, his fall into the depths and then his struggle to start a new life and to conciliate his new set of beliefs to the world around him.
Although (…)
LATEST ARTICLES
Most recent articles
-
"The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler (1903)
21 August 2023, by Samuel Butler -
"Just So Stories" by Rudyard Kipling (1902)
9 August 2023, by Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling’s delightful collection of little stories for young children – first written as bedtime stories for his little daughter – explaining how whales, camels, elephants and other creatures first got to become the way they are, and also just how numbers, letters and the alphabet were first invented.
A treat for young and old alike.
(29,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. HOW THE WHALE GOT HIS THROAT 2. HOW THE CAMEL GOT HIS HUMP 3. (…) -
"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad (1899)
5 August 2023, by Joseph ConradThis famous story (with its 38,000 words Heart of Darkness is a novella, not a novel) manages in a mysterious way to create an intriguing atmosphere of significance, even if the narrator’s mysticism and his unbounded admiration of the long-sought-after figure of Kurtz, a European trader of ivory in the upper reaches of what is clearly the Congo River who only appears towards the end of the story, is not to everyone’s taste in these more down-to-earth days.
And the rather complacent (…) -
"The Red Badge of Courage" by Steven Crane (1895)
2 August 2023, by Steven CraneThe celebrated story of fear, anguish, cowardice and heroism in the American Civil War by the young twenty-four-year-old author Steven Crane (1871-1899] that has long since taken its rightful place as one of the finest American works of its time.
(46,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. (…) -
"Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30 July 2023, by Thomas HardyHardy’s masterful last novel, a forceful, wide-ranging and subtly-erudite overview of the social foibles of the late Victorian society (we are in the 1880s in the south of England and in Oxford) as Hardy saw them, notably: a) the class barriers preventing labouring-class young people from being admitted into institutions of higher learning; b) the rigidity of the marriage institution, whereby people are forced by law and by intense social pressures to live out the rest of the days with what (…)
-
"Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Adventures" by Selma Lagerlöf (1906)
9 July 2023, by Selma LagerlöfThe wonderful account of the voyage of a young farm boy who’s been transformed by an elf into a minuscule elf-size figure and who has a series of exciting adventures flying all around Sweden with a flock of wild geese at the turn of the 20th Century.
A timeless modern classic justly famous throughout Scandinavia and elsewhere, celebrating the call of the far-off and the love of the land – and not without many very good lessons for young boys and others on how to behave to animals and (…) -
"Tess of the D’Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy (1891)
6 July 2023, by Thomas HardyHardy’s penultimate and probably his best-known work, first published four years before his final and equally scandalous novel Jude the Obscure.
Here the angle that grated the most with his contemporary public and critics (Victorian morals and rules were then at the peak of their sway over the English-speaking world’s mindset) was the wanton way whereby the female heroine Jude gets herself into trouble by foolishly falling to the spiel of a local socially and physically desirable sportsman, (…) -
"Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)
3 July 2023, by Robert Louis StevensonThe young hero of this very interesting adventure story does get kidnapped early on as one expects from the title, but rapidly escapes from the ship which has absconded him off the west coast of Scotland, and spends the rest of the book wandering around the Highlands a) trying to find someone who can understand a word of English; (b) getting very seriously mixed up in the Jacobite rebellion raging at the time; c) hiding from the Crown troops who are actively hunting him as a murder suspect; (…)
-
"The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy (1886)
30 June 2023, by Thomas HardyThe most striking scene in this novel is right at its beginning, where the then-20-year-old central character and future mayor gets drunk in a tavern and - get this - sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor! We then follow his ups and downs, especially the latter, twenty years later when his past starts catching up with him after he has become mayor and one of the town’s leading merchants. Set in the south-east region of "Wessex" (a fictionalised transposition of Hardy’s native (…)
-
"Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879)
27 June 2023, by Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Stevenson’s charming account of a twelve-day hike he made on foot in 1878, accompanied by his stubborn and self-willed donkey Modestine, across the wild country of the Cévennes in south-central France, stopping for four days at a secluded Trappist monastery where the monks were sworn to silence – except to talk with visitors when they were very voluble indeed – and continuing, almost always sleeping in the wild, through the mountainous area of the Cévennes that had been a (…)