Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXIV, May 1852, Vol. IV

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
800K words
Chapters
80

Tags

Literature English Originals Historical ReappraisalSocial ObservationPortrait GallerySlow ReadingMagazine SelectionDocumentary NarrativeBeautiful EssaysPopular Narrative

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. XXIV, May 1852, Vol. IV by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Mar 5, 2013

Editor's review

This May 1852 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine is a primary source for understanding what a mid-nineteenth-century American general-interest periodical looked like. Its contents typically mixed fiction, travel sketches, current-affairs commentary, scientific curiosities, and captions for engravings, with style shifting from section to section; readers can use it to observe Victorian English-language reading tastes and the period's classification of knowledge. As a public-domain electronic text prepared by Project Gutenberg, it is easy to search and cite, and suits use as supplementary reading in periodical history, publishing history, or nineteenth-century English prose. There is no need to read every page; skip among sections and note tonal differences among editor's notes, serial installments, and advertisement-like copy. For general readers its value lies less in narrative continuity than in period atmosphere and stylistic specimens; those reading for research or as writing models will gain more.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and section headings first, then sample two or three sections of interest rather than proceeding page by page.
  2. Keep pen and paper to note unfamiliar names, places, and periodical sections, and afterward review the period issues that drew your attention.
  3. If using it as a writing model, excerpt one or two stylistic samples and imitate their sentence patterns and paragraph organization.
  4. Read alongside background works on nineteenth-century American history or periodical history to reduce decontextualized misreadings.

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 1852 magazine suitable for reading straight through? Not really. It is a single issue of a general-interest periodical, with no continuous plot linking its sections, and page-by-page reading soon grows tiring. A more effective approach is to start with the table of contents and skip among fiction, travel, and commentary sections, treating it as a specimen of period style rather than as a single book.
How difficult is the English, and what background is needed? The text is nineteenth-century English, with long sentences and period names, places, and periodical conventions at a remove from modern English. Solid reading ability and a willingness to check background information are advisable; casual browsers can sample a short section first and then decide how much to invest.
What are the practical advantages of the electronic edition? The Project Gutenberg edition is a public-domain electronic text, convenient for full-text searching, copying excerpts, and citation, and suited to keyword lookup and corpus work. But it generally carries no modern annotation, so historical figures and events must be checked independently; keep reference works or background sources at hand.

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.