The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 991, December 24, 1898

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
126K words
Chapters
13

Tags

Literature English Originals Family BondsGrowing UpDaily ReflectionsMoral CultivationLetters and RepliesMagazine SelectionPopular NarrativeVictorian EraFemale PerspectiveGirls' Magazine

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. 991, December 24, 1898 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Dec 30, 2015

Editor's review

This is a scanned electronic edition of a single issue of a weekly magazine for girls and young women from the late Victorian period, published on Christmas Eve 1898 and therefore marked by a clear festive atmosphere and end-of-year retrospective tone. The contents typically mix serialized fiction, life advice, handicraft and domestic suggestions, moral essays, readers' questions and answers, and a little popular science, offering a direct view of the knowledge and conduct expected of middle-class girls at the time. As historical source material, its value lies not in literary masterpieces but in the way it presents the everyday tastes, gender assumptions, and reading ecology of an era; as reading material, its short pieces are suited to browsing in fragments and to comparison with periodicals of the same period. Readers interested in late nineteenth-century British social customs, women's education, children's literature, or periodical history will find vivid details here. Note that some value judgments and language habits are markedly distant from those of contemporary readers, and should be read with an awareness of historical context.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the table of contents and section headings, then dip into fiction, Q&A, or domestic sections as interest dictates.
  2. After each piece, jot down differences between the period's expectations of female roles and contemporary views, to facilitate comparison.
  3. Read alongside other girls' periodicals of the same period to observe common features in the arrangement of Christmas issues.
  4. Mark unfamiliar objects or customs, and look up the background after finishing the whole issue.

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 periodical suitable as a main text for a British literature course? Not really as a main text. It is a single issue of a popular weekly, with scattered pieces of uneven literary quality, and is better used as supplementary source material in a course—to show the section structure, target readership, and gender discourse of late nineteenth-century periodicals for young people—alongside classic novels or poetry.
Can I read it without knowing Victorian background? You can, but your understanding will be reduced. The domestic advice, moral essays, and readers' Q&A often presuppose the social common knowledge and class context of the time. It is advisable to first learn the basics of late nineteenth-century British middle-class women's education and periodical publishing, then approach the individual pieces; the implications will be easier to grasp.
Why is this particular issue worth reading on its own? It was published on December 24, 1898, right before Christmas, when year-end and festive content tends to be concentrated, and can show how the periodical handled themes such as holidays, family, and New Year outlook for girl readers. For readers studying festive periodical arrangement or late Victorian everyday culture, the date itself offers observational value.

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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.