The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor-Car

Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris), 1859-1920Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
520K words
Chapters
52

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Motoring TourRoad AdventureAdventure JourneyRomantic ComedyLight ReadingHumor ReliefExotic Culture

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 Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor-Car by A. M. Williamson et al.Author: Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris), 1859-1920,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Oct 7, 2010

Editor's review

The Lightning Conductor is an English-language novel centered on motoring, following a car through a series of strange adventures, with a flavor of light comedy and travelogue. The title phrase "lightning conductor" is itself a pun, evoking both the image of a device related to cars and speed and the coincidences and misunderstandings that keep arising in the plot. Written jointly by C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, the work is brisk in language, heavy in dialogue, and shifts scene continually with the journey, making for a light pace. For readers who want to know how people imagined speed, roads and travel to distant places when the automobile first entered daily life in the early twentieth century, this book offers a vivid popular text. It is better suited as leisure reading or as a sample of "automobile narrative" in English literature than as a serious work of social history.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Proceed chapter by chapter and pause after each stage of the journey to sort out character relationships and misunderstandings, avoiding confusion about the plot
  2. Mark descriptions related to cars and roads separately and review them after finishing, to better understand how early automobile narratives imagined these things
  3. For English extensive reading, first read through dialogue to grasp the plot, then return to vocabulary and long sentences in descriptive passages

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

FAQ

What is the story mainly about? According to the available information, this is an adventure novel built around an automobile, telling strange experiences set off by a car; it belongs to popular narrative in English literature. Specific characters and plot developments should be confirmed from the text itself, as the available information does not provide a detailed synopsis. Readers may expect a light novel that links events through a journey.
Is it suitable for close reading by English learners? Its language is generally brisk and dialogue-heavy, making it suitable as intermediate-level English extensive reading material. But as a novel from a century ago, some vocabulary and sentence patterns bear the marks of their time, and complete beginners may find it difficult. It is advisable first to read through for plot comprehension, then choose chapters of interest for close reading, using a dictionary for archaic expressions.
What should I note when reading the electronic edition? This edition is released by Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain e-book. Layout and pagination may differ from a printed book depending on the reading device, and attention should be paid to chapter heading hierarchy. When quoting the text, rely on the actual electronic text and check the context to avoid misreading caused by transcription or layout differences.

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About the author

Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris), 1859-1920 Author

Charles Norris Williamson (1859–1920) was a British writer who often collaborated with his wife, Alice Williamson. The library holds thirty-one of his works, mostly popular novels from the early twentieth century centred on motoring travel, cross-border adventure and romantic intrigue. The Lightning Conductor series follows a car and its chauffeur through a series of comic and picaresque episodes, while books such as It Happened in Egypt combine exotic settings with suspense. His fast-paced, accessible style catered to the emerging craze for automobile tourism and to popular reading tastes, giving him a modest place in early motoring-travel literature. Public information is limited, and details of his life and exact nationality remain to be confirmed.