Chums in Dixie or, The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat

St. George Henry RathborneProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
258K words
Chapters
26

Tags

English Originals TeamworkMotoring TourAdventure JourneyFriendship YearsSuspenseful PlotLight ReadingHumor ReliefAmerican SouthYouth AdventureYouth 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.Chums in Dixie; or, The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat by St. George RathborneAuthor: Rathborne, St. George, 1854-1938,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: May 17, 2007

Editor's review

This work comes from the prolific boys' adventure writer St. George Rathborne and is a typical juvenile adventure read of the early twentieth century. "Dixie" in the title points to the American South, while the "strange cruise" unfolds aboard a motorboat as a journey full of surprises and suspense. As a public-domain ebook, its value lies more in the record of literature and reading history: readers can observe how English-language boys' fiction from over a century ago organized plot, shaped a group of young protagonists, and handled friendship and adventure. The narrative moves briskly, with chapters often closing on suspense, making it suitable as light reading material in the original language. A caveat: the book inevitably carries regional descriptions and attitudes of its era, which today's readers should view with historical perspective rather than judge by contemporary standards. Overall, it is better treated as a sample for understanding early English-language juvenile adventure fiction than as a text for close reading in pursuit of literary depth.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the first two chapters to gauge the language difficulty, then proceed chapter by chapter each day to keep the suspense alive.
  2. When you meet unfamiliar old-fashioned expressions or dialect spellings, mark them first and revisit them after finishing the chapter.
  3. You may consult a map of the American South where the story takes place to strengthen your sense of place.
  4. After finishing, summarize the main plot and character relationships in a paragraph to check whether you have truly understood it.

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

FAQ

How difficult is the English in this book? It is a juvenile adventure novel from the early twentieth century. Sentence structures are not complex, but there are old-fashioned expressions, dialect spellings, and nautical vocabulary. Readers with intermediate English reading ability can finish it with a dictionary, while beginners may need an annotated edition or introductory guide.
Why is it better treated as a historical sample than as a text for close reading? Its main value lies in showing the common conventions of early English-language juvenile adventure fiction: young companions, a means of transport, unexpected events, and suspenseful chapter endings. These features make it good material for observing genre fiction, but thematic depth and character portrayal are not its strengths, so it need not be held to the standard of a literary classic.
Do I need to know the background of the American South in advance? Systematic knowledge is not necessary, but knowing that the story is set in "Dixie," that is, the American South, helps in understanding place names and characters' speech. The regional descriptions carry the marks of their time; readers are advised to treat the book as a historical text and to examine old attitudes critically rather than accept them outright.

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

St. George Henry Rathborne Author · American · 1854–1938

St. George Henry Rathborne (1854–1938) was an American writer of popular fiction, born in Covington, Kentucky. Under his own name and dozens of pen names, he produced a great many adventure stories for boys and dime novels, working with Street & Smith for twenty years as both author and editor. His books, such as The House Boat Boys, Canoe Mates in Canada, and The Pioneer Boys of the Ohio, typically follow young protagonists exploring the wilderness, rivers, and lakes of North America. Fast-paced and aimed at juvenile readers, they bear the clear mark of their era. Public information about him is limited and biographical details are largely unavailable, yet with more than three hundred works to his name he holds a place in American popular publishing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.