The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 988, December 3, 1898

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5

Word count: 108K words
Chapters: 11

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.The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 988, December 3, 1898 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Dec 27, 2015

Editor's review

This is the single-issue electronic edition of The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 988, dated December 3, 1898, a weekly periodical for girls and young women from the late Victorian era. Its contents typically mix serialized fiction, advice on daily life, crafts and leisure topics, and reader correspondence, combining entertainment with instruction. Its value for readers lies not in the literary merit of any single piece but in showing the column structure, topic selection, and value discourse of girls' reading matter of the time: how conduct, housekeeping, careers, and reading were discussed, and how stories and Q&A guided young readers. As a public-domain historical text, it also serves as primary material for studying late Victorian popular publishing, women's education, and youth reading. It is best read as a periodical rather than a book, with attention to how its columns are paired and to the editorial voice.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying late Victorian women's reading matter, youth publishing, and popular culture
History enthusiasts interested in late 19th-century British social life and gender discourse
Readers with good English proficiency who enjoy browsing old periodicals by column
Learners who need public-domain English historical sources for translation or textual analysis

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a complete novel or a continuous narrative
Readers seeking modern life advice and practical skills
Beginner learners who find English reading difficult and need annotations and background explanation

Reading tips

First skim the contents and column divisions, then choose sections of interest such as serialized fiction or reader Q&A
Read the periodical in its 1898 context and understand its advisory tone, rather than judging it directly by contemporary standards
For research, note column types, forms of address, and topic distribution for comparison with periodicals from the same period
A single issue is limited in length; read it alongside other issues or contemporaneous girls' periodicals to observe continuity

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.

FAQ

Is this issue a complete book?

No. It is The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 988, a weekly issue published on December 3, 1898, and is one issue of a periodical. It may contain serial fragments and multiple columns, and its structure should be understood as that of a periodical rather than a complete book.

Can I understand it without having read previous issues?

Most columns can be read independently, but if serialized fiction is included, a single issue may be only one installment, and the characters and plot require earlier context. It is advisable to read the short columns and Q&A first, then decide whether to look up adjacent issues to fill in the serial content.

What use is this book for research on women's history?

It can serve as a primary sample of late Victorian girls' reading matter, helping to observe how editors presented conduct norms, housekeeping, careers, and reading tastes for young women at the time. Researchers can analyze column arrangement, advisory tone, and topic selection, but a single issue is limited material and should be used alongside contemporaneous periodicals and related historical sources.

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.