King John of Jingalo: The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties

Laurence HousmanProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
682K words
Chapters
69

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Court PoliticsPolitical FantasyPolitical AllegoryMonarch in DistressPower GameCrisis of KingshipReform and TraditionHumorous NarrationSatirical StyleImaginary Kingdom

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.King John of Jingalo: The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties by Laurence HousmanAuthor: Housman, Laurence, 1865-1959,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 4, 2006

Editor's review

Laurence Housman's King John of Jingalo is a satirical tale of an invented monarch who finds himself mired in one difficulty after another in the business of ruling. Housman was an English illustrator, playwright and writer whose work often carries social allegory and a fantastical streak, and this book follows that path: using an imaginary kingdom as its vehicle, it uses the monarch's predicaments to reflect the absurdities of institutions, power and human nature. It is not a serious historical biography, so readers should not look for factual correspondences but read it as a political fable. The original is in English, in the British idiom of the early twentieth century, with sentence structures and vocabulary that may feel somewhat unfamiliar to today's readers; its length and narrative pace, however, suit reading in instalments. For readers who enjoy political satire and are interested in the literary imagination of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, this book offers a light yet rewarding sample. While reading, pay attention to how the author handles serious issues with humour and to the real-world allusions behind the invented monarch.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the first few chapters to get used to the author's satirical tone and invented setting before deciding on a reading pace.
  2. Keep a list of common literary English words at hand; skip archaic expressions for now and look them up later.
  3. Compare the monarch's difficulties with real political phenomena and jot down what the allegory points to.
  4. Read one or two chapters a day to avoid fatigue from dense passages of long sentences.

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

FAQ

Is this book about the real King John of England? No. It is a fictional story by Laurence Housman whose protagonist is the monarch of the imaginary kingdom of Jingalo, not the historical King John. The King John of the title is a literary name; readers should not equate it with the historical John of England but understand the book as a political fable and satirical novel.
How difficult is the original English? The original is early twentieth-century British English, with rather long sentences and period vocabulary, though the narrative as a whole is plain. Readers with a university-level foundation in English who are used to reading English fiction can attempt it; those with a limited vocabulary should read it in instalments with a dictionary and need not try to grasp every allegorical point at once.
Is this book suitable as historical material? No. It is a work of fiction whose value lies in its allegory and narrative art, not in historical evidence. Those who want to understand the British monarchy or the history of King John should choose historical monographs; this book can serve as supplementary reading for understanding how writers of the time imagined power and institutions.

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

Laurence Housman Author · British · 1865–1959

Laurence Housman (1865–1959) was a British writer, illustrator and playwright, and the younger brother of the poet A. E. Housman. He began his career as an illustrator and drew illustrations for collections of Tales from the Arabian Nights; he later rose to fame with his novel An Englishwoman's Love-Letters and wrote plays such as Angels and Ministers and Victoria, noted for their satirical touch, while actively supporting the women's suffrage movement. His subjects are often drawn from fairy tales, legends and Arabian stories, and his style is light and imaginative, combining the fantasy of fairy tales with the edge of satirical drama. Nine of his works are held in the collection, including Stories from The Arabian Nights, Princess Badoura, Moonshine & Clover and The Blue Moon, showing that his writing spans illustration, fiction and drama and made a distinctive place for itself in British letters from the late Victorian period into the twentieth century. Public information is limited, and no other biographical details are conjectured.