Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 698

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.6

Word count: 101K words
Chapters: 11

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. Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 698 by Various. Author: Various. Language: English. Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals. Release Date: Oct 29, 2014

Editor's review

This is an electronic reprint of Issue No. 698 of Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, a nineteenth-century British general-interest periodical, prepared and released by Project Gutenberg. Its value lies not in any single famous piece but in the complete presentation of how a mid-Victorian knowledge magazine for ordinary readers was put together: serialized fiction, short popular-science pieces, craft instructions, and reader queries are interleaved, with literary interest and practical knowledge given equal weight. For readers studying Victorian publishing history, the history of periodicals, or the popularization of science, original journals of this kind are rare primary material, revealing column layouts, modes of attribution, advertisements, and editorial notes as they actually appeared. It need not be read page by page; sampling by column is more suitable, treating it as a cross-section of its era. The text is nineteenth-century English, whose syntax and vocabulary are distant from contemporary usage and require some patience.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Scholars and students of Victorian periodical and publishing history
Readers interested in the history of popular science and nineteenth-century science communication
English majors seeking original periodical material for textual analysis
Readers of history and literature who enjoy browsing old journals and absorbing the prose of the period

Not a good fit for

Readers seeking a complete long-form story or a single-subject monograph
Beginners whose English is not yet fluent and who need modern annotations
E-book users who prefer contemporary typography and clear table-of-contents navigation

Reading tips

Begin by browsing the issue's table of contents or column headings, then choose one piece each from literature, science, and craft to read in parallel.
Do not feel obliged to verify every unfamiliar name, place, or object; first grasp the overall tone of the piece.
Read alongside background material on nineteenth-century British social history to understand the journal's intended readership.
Excerpt passages of interest as samples of periodical style and of how knowledge was categorized.

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.

FAQ

Is this a complete book or a single magazine issue?

This is the electronic edition of Issue No. 698 of Chambers's Journal, one installment of a periodical made up of multiple articles and columns, not a monograph written around a single theme.

What level of English is needed to read this book?

The original is nineteenth-century English with long sentences and older vocabulary. General proficiency in reading English newspapers and periodicals is enough to attempt it, but rare words and historical background will require reference works or contextual material.

What are the characteristics of the Project Gutenberg edition?

Project Gutenberg provides free electronic texts for the preservation and dissemination of public-domain works. This edition is an electronic transcription of the original issue, convenient for searching and citation, though its typography and illustrations differ from the paper original.

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

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.