Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
847K words
Chapters
85

Tags

Literature English Originals Illustrated GuideMagazine SelectionBeautiful EssaysEclectic ReadingSocial ObservationVictorian EraPopular 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.Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Mar 1, 2010

Editor's review

The January 1851 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine offers a window into mid-nineteenth-century American popular reading tastes. As a general-interest monthly, it typically gathered essays, travel sketches, profiles, serialized fiction, and editorial miscellany, pitched between serious commentary and domestic entertainment—reflecting the concerns of middle-class readers while preserving the periodical's value as a historical slice of its era. The Project Gutenberg electronic text is easy to search and excerpt, making it best read as a primary source rather than straight through. Its appeal: readers can encounter firsthand the narrative tone, advertising-style phrasing, and habits of knowledge classification of Victorian America—useful for anyone studying periodical history, print culture, or nineteenth-century English prose. Read with questions in mind—how the departments are organized, how foreign subjects are presented—rather than page by page.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the table of contents and editor's columns, then closely read two or three topics of interest and skim the rest.
  2. Note period diction, advertising tone, and knowledge classification as you go, keeping a source notebook.
  3. For research, compare with other periodicals of the same period to observe differences in department structure.
  4. Skip unfamiliar names and places at first and look them up after finishing a passage, to avoid constant interruption.

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 book or a single magazine issue? This is Volume 2, No. 8 of Harper's New Monthly Magazine—the single issue for January 1851, compiled from articles by many different authors, not a long work by one author. Read by selecting individual pieces rather than as a continuous book.
How difficult is the English, and what background is needed? The text is nineteenth-century English with long sentences and older diction, but overall it is the language of a general-interest periodical. University-level English reading ability, with a dictionary, is enough to proceed; unfamiliar names, places, and allusions will slow you down somewhat, so background material helps.
Is the electronic edition suitable for academic citation? The Project Gutenberg version is convenient for searching and excerpting and can serve as a reading and preliminary citation copy. For formal academic writing, however, verify page numbers and wording against a facsimile or authoritative database, checking for typesetting differences and possible transcription issues before citing.

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.