Charles' Journey to France, and Other Tales

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (née Aikin)Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
24K words
Chapters
3

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Growing UpMoral CultivationPopular NarrativeExotic CultureParent-Child ReadingYouth Reading

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.Charles' Journey to France, and Other Tales by Mrs. BarbauldAuthor: Barbauld, Mrs. (Anna Letitia), 1743-1825,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Jul 11, 2011

Editor's review

Charles' Journey to France, and Other Tales is a collection of children's stories by Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825), a public-domain ebook prepared by Project Gutenberg. Barbauld was an important British author of children's literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; her work centers on moral instruction, with plain language and short pieces that often use travel and everyday stories to convey manners, duty, and judgment to young readers. The title story follows Charles's journey to France, and the other short tales serve equally educational aims. For today's readers its value lies more in literary and educational history: it shows how early children's books designed narrative and instruction, and it can serve as light reading material for English learners encountering classical children's prose. It is best read as a historical text rather than a modern children's book, with attention to differences in period attitudes.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read one short story at a time and, after each, summarize its moral theme in a sentence or two.
  2. Read alongside the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children's education to understand the ideas of manners and duty in the stories.
  3. English learners can start with the title story, then move on to shorter pieces.
  4. In reading notes, distinguish story content from period attitudes and avoid applying modern standards directly.

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable to read directly to children? It is a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children's stories whose language and attitudes bear the marks of their time and differ considerably from modern children's books. Parents or teachers are advised to read it first before deciding whether to introduce it to children.
What is Barbauld's place in the history of children's literature? According to public-domain general knowledge, Anna Letitia Barbauld was an important early author of English children's literature, known for moral instruction and plain narrative, and she influenced later children's books.
Are the stories in the book long? This is a collection of short stories, each relatively brief and suitable for reading in segments. For specific pieces and lengths, refer to the Project Gutenberg electronic text.

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

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (née Aikin) Author · British · 1743–1825

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) was an English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor and children's writer, and a member of the Bluestocking circle. She collaborated with her brother John Aikin on Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose (1773) and later on Evenings at Home, a collection of dialogues and stories designed to instruct young readers and among the earlier serial works in children's literature. Her long poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) criticized Britain's involvement in the Napoleonic Wars and proved widely influential. Other works include Charles's Journey to France, and Other Tales. Her writing spans poetry, essays and educational works for children, in a clear and often argumentative style.