Best of
19th-Century

1969

Great Short Works of Herman Melville


Herman Melville - 1969
    Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master.As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer . . . a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humour, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humour is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character."The town-ho's story --Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street --Cock-a-doodle-doo! or, The crowing of the noble cock Beneventano --The encantadas or Enchanted Isles --The two temples --Poor man's pudding and rich man's crumbs --The happy failure : a story of the river Hudson --The lightning-rod man --The fiddler --The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids --The bell-tower --Benito Cereno --Jimmy Rose --I and my chimney --The 'Gees --The apple-tree table, or Original spiritual manifestations --The piazza --The Marquis de Grandvin --Three "Jack Gentian sketches" --John Marr --Daniel Orme --Billy Budd, sailor.

The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural


Guy de Maupassant - 1969
    These 31 stories of the supernatural explore the furthest reaches of the macabre and at the same time parallel de Maupassant's own descent into madness and death. Includes a Foreword by modern master horror writer Ramsey Campbell.The Horla --The Devil --Two friends --Fear --The hand --Coco --The mannerism --The madwoman --Mohammed-Fripouille --The blind man --At sea --Apparition --Saint-Antoine --The wolf --Terror --The diary of a madman --A vendetta --The smile of Schopenhauer --On the river --He? --Old Milon --The head of hair --The inn --Mother Savage --Was he mad? --The dead girl --Mademoiselle Cocotte --A night in Paris --The case of Louise Roque --The drowned man --Who knows?

Christ's Glorious Achievements (The Spurgeon Collection)


Charles Haddon Spurgeon - 1969
    Do's and Don't seems to be what it is all about. But if that's what we think Christianity is all about then we have a lot to learn. The key to understanding Christianity is not something we have to do, but rather something that Jesus Christ has already achieved on our behalf.This book, by one of the most influential Christians of the last 200 years, looks at what Christ has done for us. Read it and then ask yourself the question "If Christ has done all this for me, is anything I am asked to do for Christ too much in return?"

John Keats


Robert Gittings - 1969
    One of the great figures of Romanticism, Keats poured his tragically short and troubled life into creating poetry: in Robert Gittings's words, "With no other poet are the life and the works so closely linked". He offers insights into Keats's family background, his financial difficulties, illnesses and unhappy love affair with Fanny Brawne, interpreting evrey poem in the context of Keats's experience. Meticulously researched using original sources, this is the most complete picture of Keats that has ever appeared.Contents: ForewordPrologue to BiographyApprentice YearsYears of TrialThe Living YearThe Last YearEpilogue to LifeAppendices: The Jennings & Sweetinburgh Families Keats' Father Keats & Venereal Disease Keats' Use of BawdyIndex

Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch


David Howarth - 1969
    Many people know the facts about Nelson's death, but far less of the battle in which he died: a single afternoon's fighting that forever ended Napoleon's hope of invading England. With Napoleon's failure, the British navy reigned supreme on the high seas-a supremacy that lasted until the age of air power. David Howard, who served as a war correspondent during the battle of Dunkirk and won awards for his service as a secret agent during that war, writes with great understanding about fighting amidst the perils of the sea.

Tolstoy's Diaries Volume 1: 1847-1894


Leo Tolstoy - 1969
    F. Christian's editions of Tolstoy's Diaries and Letters, both in two volumes, are definitive. Volume 1 of the Diaries covers the years 1847-1894, and Volume 2 the years 1895-1910. Passages have been chosen to reflect Tolstoy's preoccupations as a writer - his views on his own work and that of others - and his development as a person and as a thinker. The passages also show his attitude to contemporary social problems, rural life, industrialisation, education, and later, to religious and spiritual questions.R. F. Christian has grouped the diary entries chronologically, introducing each period with a brief and informative summary of the main biographical details of Tolstoy's life. The result is something much more than source material for Tolstoy's life and thought, though it could hardly be richer in that respect, it is a unique, direct and unhindered portrait of a great man and a very great writer in the variegation of his everyday existence.'As a picture of the turbulent Russian world which Tolstoy inhabited these diaries are incomparable - the raw stuff not yet processed into art.' Anthony Burgess'Professor Christian's work, a fitting companion to his two-volume edition of the Letters, is an important and long-overdue contribution to our knowledge of Tolstoy.' D. M. Thomas, Sunday Times'What Professor R. F. Christian has done is to provide us with a huge two-volume digest, punctiliously edited and translated . . . It is a model of scholarship, one of the most important books to be published in recent years.' A. N. Wilson, The Spectator'R. F. Christian's engagement for some fifteen years with (Tolstoy's) letters and diaries has been a notable service to the English-speaking public.' Henry Gifford, Times Literary Supplement

Drums Along the Khyber


Philip McCutchan - 1969
    James Ogilvie is the third generation.Pitchforked with mixed feelings into imperial Britain’s elite military academy, Sandhurst, and then into the family regiment, he finds himself in 1894 a subaltern en route to India – a torrid journey out that teaches him the first lessons of military life and the command of men.His initiation is made more difficult by the vindictive attentions of the adjutant, Captain Black, and by the high expectations placed on him by his own irascible father, his Divisional Commander on the North West Frontier of India.Ogilvie gets his first taste of action when the Royal Strathspeys are sent through the Khyber Pass to contain the rebel Ahmed Khan outside Jalalabad. Fighting the border tribesmen brings brushes with death, but also many opportunities for the kind of glory that can forge a distinguished military career. But as the campaign goes on, Ogilvie also starts to doubt the entire Imperial project.‘Drums Along the Khyber’ is a thrilling historical adventure story, rich in period detail. It is the first in the Ogilvie series of novels by Philip McCutchan. ‘The adventure-writer succeeds who makes you read faster than you really can…Drums Along the Khyber has something of this quality’ – The Sunday Times Philip McCutchan (1920-1996) grew up in the naval atmosphere of Portsmouth Dockyard and developed a lifetime's interest in the sea. Military history was an early interest resulting in several fiction books, from amongst his large output, about the British Army and its campaigns, especially in the last 150 years.Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

The Troika Belle


Ira J. Morris - 1969
    Alternate title "The Rake and the Rebel"A coming of age story in 19th century Russia.

Letters from the Underworld and Other Tales


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1969
    Includes The Gentle Maiden and The Landlady

The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830: Revised Edition


Donald Keene - 1969
    These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan, which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry.The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must become one of the great nations of the world.

The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846


Francis Paul Prucha - 1969
    No one favored a peacetime army. Yet the years that followed saw the young nation embark on a dramatic surge of expansion that not demanded the military as national protectors. Sword of the Republic is the story of the army in its new multicultural role as agents of the republic during the period 1783-1846.It is the story of federal troops called up to enforce paper possession with physical occupation when treaty and purchase opened up the region from the Appalachians west to the Mississippi and the vast new frontiers in the Louisiana Territory. The duties of these soldiers were to protect the settlers and to establish a military presence that maintained American rights with honor in the face of Indian intransigence and British and Spanish scheming. These soldiers, in accomplishing their mission, became farmers, roadbuilders, scientists, and lumbermen: pioneers of the new West.At Fallen Timbers, Tippecanoe, and the Thames, the federal military forces met the early challenge from the Indian nations and their British allies. Military control of strategic points on the Great Lakes and western rivers enforced American control of the fur trade. Army endeavors shored up crumbling territorial edges where Spanish an British officials or traders weakened American power. Sword of the Republic recounts vividly the Blackhawk War and the Florida War. It details the construction of western forts and tells the tragic story of the removal of Indians from the East. It is a chronicle of the transition from wilderness to hard-core settlement.

Blake Records


G.E. Bentley Jr. - 1969
    This fascinating book collects all the known documentary records relating to Blake's long and productive life. Distinguished Blake expert, G. E. Bentley, Jr., editor of the first edition of Blake Records and Blake Records Supplement, brings together new and updated material on Blake's life, career, family, friends, and patrons. The result of decades of research, this book is comprehensive, accessible, and highly enlightening.

Froudacity: West Indian Fables


John Jacobs Thomas - 1969
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Glass Phoenix


Mary Stetson Clarke - 1969
    Ben was fascinated by the fiery furnaces and the skill and daring of the men who worked with the molten glass. And when Mr. Jarvis, the factory's founder, told him of his dream of discovering some day the formula for the golden-ruby glass which was only known in Bohemia, Ben's imagination was kindled. But his interest in glassmaking is brought to the fore when his father is lost at sea and Ben became responsible for supporting his family.Then he began to work at the glass factory, and so began a chain of events he could never have foreseen: his acquiring the formula for the golden-ruby glasss by a strange and touching accident of fate; his growing affection for the delightful girl who helped him to translate the German in which it was written; his at first unsuccessful attempt to produce the glass; and the totally unexpected - and thrilling! - discovery of the secret of its beauty.Here is a fine spirited description of interesting people, and its vivid description of the making of the now famous Sandwich glass is authentic and arresting.