Mr. Jacobs: A Tale of the Drummer, the Reporter, and the Prestidigitateur

Bates, Arlo, 1850-1918Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
19K words
Chapters
2

Tags

English Originals Social ObservationPortrait GalleryUrban RomanceSocial ConductComplex HumanityPsychological InsightDaily ReflectionsLight ReadingHumor ReliefSatirical Style

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.Mr. Jacobs: A Tale of the Drummer, the Reporter, and the Prestidigitateur by BatesAuthor: Bates, Arlo, 1850-1918,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 21, 2012

Editor's review

Mr. Jacobs: A Tale of the Drummer, the Reporter, and the Prestidigitateur is a short narrative work by the American writer Arlo Bates (1850–1918). Its title names three types of figures: the traveling salesman, the reporter, and the magician. Bates himself was closely connected with literary editing and academic circles, and his work often carries an amusing, lightly satirical tone of social observation. This book weaves its story from the interlocking of these three professional roles, and through them the reader glimpses late nineteenth-century American urban and commercial life, and how “performance” and “reporting” can create impressions in which truth and falsehood are hard to tell apart. Its appeal lies not in intricate plotting but in the pairing of character types and professional atmosphere, making it a light read for understanding popular narrative and occupational imagination of the period. Given its length and subject, it is better read as a story with a flavor of social observation than as a work of strong suspense or deep psychological portraiture. The public-domain electronic edition from Project Gutenberg makes the original text easy to obtain and suits extensive reading in English and supplementary reading in literary history.

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Reading tips

  1. First note how the three occupational roles named in the title divide the work, then read how they create misunderstandings and interest for one another.
  2. Read it as a short story of social manners; there is no need to scrutinize every sentence—focus on the interest of character types and dialogue.
  3. It reads more smoothly alongside general background on late nineteenth-century American commerce and the press.
  4. For extensive reading in English, read it in two or three sittings, and after each sitting summarize the main scenes of that part in one sentence.

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

FAQ

What do the three kinds of people in the title refer to? Drummer means a traveling salesman, Reporter means a journalist, and Prestidigitateur means a magician or conjurer. The story revolves around these three professional roles, and the title itself already signals the character types and the narrative interest.
Is this book long? Is it suitable to read in one sitting? Judging by its subject and narrative mode, it is closer to a light story than a weighty full-length novel. It can be read in two or three sittings, each focusing on the scenes of one group of characters, which makes for easier reading and helps in reviewing the relationships afterward.
Do I need to know the author's background before reading? No special study is necessary beforehand. It is enough to know that Bates was an American writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose work often carries social observation and light satire. If you are interested in the press and commercial background, you can add some general knowledge on those subjects.

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

Bates, Arlo, 1850-1918 Author

Arlo Bates (1850–1918) was an American author and teacher of literature. Thirteen of his works are held in this Chinese-language book collection, commonly grouped under inspirational and personal growth. Public information about him is limited, and details of his life are difficult to verify, yet his works reveal his main directions. On the one hand he wrote on writing and literary education, including Talks on Writing English (First Series), Talks on Teaching Literature and Talks on the Study of Literature, which discuss methods of writing and approaches to literary study in plain, well-organized prose with the friendly tone of classroom talks. On the other hand he wrote fiction and stories, such as The Puritans, Patty's Perversities, A Book o' Nine Tales, The Intoxicated Ghost, and Other Stories and The Pagans, dealing with social manners and everyday human relations in a style mixing humor and satire. Overall, he combined the roles of teacher and writer, and his works, practical in guidance and readable in narrative, offer some value for learning English writing and understanding the literary tastes of his time.