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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- English literature students who need public-domain texts for supplementary course reading
- General readers interested in late nineteenth-century English fiction
- Digital humanities enthusiasts studying Project Gutenberg and public-domain e-books
- Advanced learners who want to practice reading with short original English works
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting modern fast-paced suspense or strongly plotted fiction
- Beginner to intermediate learners with weak English who need extensive annotation
- Readers who only want to read a Chinese translation
Reading tips
- Read the preface or publication information first to confirm the authors' division of work and the source of the text, then move on to the main text.
- Read one or two chapters a day; mark unfamiliar expressions and look them up together after finishing the chapter.
- Cross-check the metadata on the Project Gutenberg page and note the edition and release date.
- After finishing, summarize the narrative structure in two or three sentences to test your overall grasp of the original English.
About the publisher
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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About the author
Walter Herries Pollock (1850–1926) was a British writer and playwright who also wrote on the history of fencing and on literary criticism. His career spanned the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century, and his interests were not confined to a single genre: he wrote plays, traced the history of the comparatively obscure subject of fencing, and left criticism on literature. As far as this collection is concerned, only one work by him is held, namely He, and the publicly available material is limited, making it difficult to judge the full scale of his output or his standing in literature. Overall, his writing reflects the tradition of the British man of letters who combines creative work with miscellaneous scholarship: his dramatic training gave him a sense of narrative and dialogue, his research into fencing shows an interest in technical detail and historical sources, and his criticism lends his prose a tone of appraisal and discrimination. For today's readers he is mentioned chiefly as a broadly curious minor literary figure who wrote across several fields.
