A Beacon for the Blind: Being a Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster-

Holt, Winifred, 1870-1945Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
472K words
Chapters
48

Tags

English Originals General Biography Education EquitySocial ReformPostal ReformPolitical FigureBlind ScholarUndeterred SpiritInspirationComplex HumanityBiographical NarrativeVictorian Era

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Beacon for the Blind: Being a Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster-Author: Holt, Winifred, 1870-1945,Language: English, Class: DA: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Great Britain, Ireland, Central Europe, Release Date: Jun 12, 2016

Editor's review

This book is a life of Henry Fawcett. Blind for much of his life, Fawcett nevertheless served as British Postmaster General, and his experience is itself a record of will and public service. Winifred Holt writes in a plain style, linking the subject's education, political career, and daily associations, so that readers see how a visually impaired person sought a place and made a difference within the social framework of the Victorian era. Its value lies not in sentimentality but in presenting a concrete, institutional path of struggle: how education intervened, how friends supported, how public office yielded to ability rather than physical condition. For readers concerned with disability history, modern British political institutions, or the writing of biography, this public-domain e-book offers solid first-hand narrative. Readers may treat it as historical source material, noting where the era's attitudes differ from today's.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and chapter summaries first to clarify the turning points before and after the subject's blindness, then enter the main text.
  2. Look up terms relating to the British Parliament and postal system as you go, to avoid giving up because of background gaps.
  3. Read alongside social histories of Britain from the same period to understand the institutional environment the subject inhabited.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48

FAQ

Is this book in the original English, and how difficult is it? This is an English public-domain e-book released by Project Gutenberg, written in the English biographical style of the 19th to early 20th century; sentences are long but vocabulary is not especially difficult. Readers with university-level English reading ability can finish it with a dictionary, the main task being familiarization with historical background rather than tackling rare words.
Who was Henry Fawcett? According to this book, he was a blind British Postmaster General. The biography centers on his life after he became blind, recording his education, participation in public affairs, and his time as Postmaster General; it is case material for understanding public participation by people with disabilities in the Victorian era.
What background knowledge is needed to read this biography? It is best to have a basic understanding of 19th-century British political institutions and the postal system, and to know how society then generally viewed people with visual impairments. It can be read without this background, but the weight of the subject's achievements will be less fully appreciated; looking up relevant entries while reading is recommended.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Holt, Winifred, 1870-1945 Author · 1870–1945

Winifred Holt (1870–1945) was an English-language author active from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth. Public information about her life and nationality is currently quite limited and remains to be verified. One work by her is held in the collection: A Beacon for the Blind: Being a Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster, a biography of Henry Fawcett. The surviving bibliographic record indicates that Holt's writing centered on biography, with attention to figures who achieved much despite disability, and that her narrative follows the course of a life while combining documentary research with character portrayal. The biography offers Chinese readers a reference for understanding Fawcett and the social situation of disabled people in the Victorian era, and reflects the author's choice of subject in biographical writing. Given the limited sources, her education, career, and literary standing cannot be established at present, and the above account rests only on verifiable information in the collection.