Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
795K words
Chapters
80

Tags

Literature English Originals Humanistic CareSlow ReadingWestern ThoughtMagazine SelectionMiscellanyPopular NarrativeEclectic ReadingCultural ChangeSocial ObservationVictorian 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. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II. by Various. Author: Various. Language: English. Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals. Release Date: Dec 7, 2012

Editor's review

This is a public-domain electronic edition of the April 1851 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Vol. II, No. XI), a representative specimen of the mid-nineteenth-century American general monthly. Such periodicals typically mixed serialized fiction, current-affairs commentary, travel writing, popular science, and illustrations, making them primary material for observing contemporary public reading tastes, social issues, and editorial practice. For Chinese readers its value lies not in reading it cover to cover but in selective sampling: one may dip into columns of interest to feel the stylistic rhythm of a nineteenth-century English-language periodical, or use it as supplementary material for research on American periodical history, print culture, or Victorian social discourse. The Project Gutenberg version is easy to search and cite, suiting academic preparation and topic-based browsing. Note that the original is in English, with miscellaneous columns and pieces of widely varying length and no editorial introduction; beginners may easily get lost, so it is advisable to look at the table of contents first and then read selectively.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Skim the table of contents first, sample two or three pieces by column type, then decide where to go deeper.
  2. Treat the periodical as a slice of its era, noting recurring issues and rhetoric as you read.
  3. For research, excerpt by theme and note issue and page numbers for later citation and verification.
  4. Read only one or two pieces at a time to avoid fatigue from the mixed columns.

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
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80

FAQ

Is this book a complete book or a single issue of a periodical? It is the electronic edition of the April 1851 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, i.e., Vol. II, No. XI; its content is an assembly of the monthly's various columns at the time, not a complete work written around a single theme.
What level of English is needed to read this old periodical? The original is nineteenth-century English, whose sentence patterns and vocabulary differ from contemporary English; upper-intermediate reading ability is recommended. Beginners may start with short columns and infer unusual expressions from context rather than checking every word, so as not to disrupt the overall rhythm.
Can it be used to cite historical facts? It can be cited as material reflecting the opinion and editorial stance of its time, but it should not be treated directly as factual evidence. Nineteenth-century periodicals often carry period bias and unverified information; when citing, it is better to note its nature as a discourse sample and compare it with later scholarship.
Is this book suitable for reading from beginning to end? Not very. The periodical's columns are miscellaneous and its genres diverse, so continuous reading easily loses focus. A more effective approach is to look at the table of contents first and read selected pieces according to interest or research topic, using it as a searchable collection of period texts.

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.