Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. III, No. XVII, October 1851

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
836K words
Chapters
84

Tags

Literature English Originals Social ObservationPortrait GalleryUrban RomanceComplex HumanityDaily ReflectionsWestern ThoughtMagazine SelectionBeautiful EssaysPopular NarrativeVictorian 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, Vol. III, No. XVII, October 1851 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Nov 19, 2012

Editor's review

This is the full-text electronic edition of the October 1851 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, preserving the original character of a mid-nineteenth-century American general-interest periodical. Its value lies not in any single famous piece but in the generic mixture it presents as a slice of its era: serialized fiction, commentary on current affairs, travel sketches, short popular-science pieces, book reviews, and illustration captions appear side by side, allowing readers to observe the structure of middle-Victorian popular reading tastes and the classification of knowledge. As a public-domain Project Gutenberg text, it is easy to search, cite, and compare, making it especially suitable as primary material for the history of nineteenth-century English-language periodicals and for studies of American literature and social culture. It need not be read page by page; readers can jump between sections, paying attention to advertisement pages, editorial notes, and the junctures between installments, which often provide information beyond standard historical narratives. For general readers, it is more like an old magazine to browse at random than a linearly progressing book.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and editorial sections, mark the genres that interest you, then jump between sections rather than reading straight through.
  2. When you encounter a fragment of a serialized novel, note the issue number and page so you can compare it with other issues and fill in the context.
  3. As you read, jot down social details from advertisements, book reviews, and readers' letters for notes on cultural history.
  4. For scholarly citation, check the original page numbers against the paragraph numbering of the Gutenberg text to avoid misattribution when quoting indirectly.

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 book a facsimile of the original 1851 issue? No, it is not a facsimile but a plain-text electronic edition produced by Project Gutenberg from a transcription of the public-domain original. It preserves the verbal content but not the original layout, illustrations, or paper texture; it is suitable for reading and searching, not for facsimile comparison in the bibliographic sense.
Can someone who does not know nineteenth-century English read it? Yes, but with difficulty. The text contains many period expressions, allusions, and long sentences, and has no modern annotation. Good English reading ability is recommended, or use a dictionary and historical background materials; beginners are better served by an anthology with an introduction and notes.
What kinds of content does this issue contain? As a general monthly, it typically includes serialized fiction, commentary on current affairs and society, travel sketches, short popular-science pieces, book reviews, and editorial sections. For specific contents, consult the electronic table of contents; the genres differ markedly between sections, so it is suited to reading by interest.
Is it suitable for scholarly citation? It can be used as a public-domain primary source, but note that the Gutenberg text is a transcription and may contain typographical differences. Rigorous citation should check the original page numbers or facsimile resources and state in the note the electronic edition and release date relied upon.

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.