Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VI, November 1850, Vol. I

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
816K words
Chapters
82

Tags

Literature English Originals Portrait GalleryUrban RomanceDaily ReflectionsMagazine SelectionBeautiful EssaysPopular Narrative19th CenturyCultural ChangeSocial ObservationCross-Cultural View

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.Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VI, November 1850, Vol. I by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Jul 6, 2012

Editor's review

This is a full facsimile e-edition of the November 1850 sixth issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, prepared and released by Project Gutenberg. Its value lies not in any single famous piece but in presenting the complete editorial approach and content structure of a mid-nineteenth-century American general-interest monthly: literature, current-affairs commentary, popular science, travel sketches, and lifestyle columns appear side by side, letting readers see the intellectual interests and reading rhythms of middle-class readers of the time. As a historical source, it preserves advertisements, editorial notes, and column arrangement more faithfully than an anthology, making it suitable for close reading by those studying nineteenth-century American print culture, periodical history, or changes in the English language. General readers who only want fiction may find the information density scattered; but those willing to read by column, treating it as a window into everyday reading life in the 1850s, will gain something quite concrete.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and editorial columns first to understand the issue's structure, then dip into columns of interest
  2. Jot down unfamiliar historical names or events as you go, and look up the background afterward
  3. Read one or two columns a day, taking it as a historical window rather than a continuous narrative
  4. For research, focus on advertisements, column arrangement, and stylistic differences rather than merely excerpting content

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

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FAQ

Is this a complete issue or a selection? This is an e-edition of the November 1850 sixth issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, presented in the original column arrangement as a whole issue, including literature, commentary, popular science, and lifestyle columns; it is not a selection of just a few pieces.
Can I read it if my English is average? Yes, but it takes patience. The text is nineteenth-century English with long sentences, and some topics depend on background knowledge of the time. Try short columns first, use a dictionary and look up background as needed, and don't force yourself to go word by word from start to finish.
Is it suitable as material for an American literature course? It works as supplementary material for periodical history and print culture, not as a selection of literary classics. It shows how works were placed alongside reviews, advertisements, and lifestyle columns, helping students understand the reading ecology and editorial strategies of the time.

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.