The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
74K words
Chapters
8

Tags

English Originals Literature Strange TalesCuriositiesSocial ObservationEnglish SocietyUrban LifeMoral InstructionMagazine SelectionPopular ExplanationVictorian EraIllustrated Book

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 Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Jun 1, 2004

Editor's review

This book is a selected compilation of The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, a comprehensive nineteenth-century British periodical, digitized by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain electronic text. Its contents span essays, stories, popular-science sketches, anecdotes, and reader queries, written in a light style with moderate information density, preserving the lively tone of Victorian popular reading. Its value lies not in systematic knowledge but in offering a window onto what ordinary people cared about, how they amused themselves, and how they understood the world. For readers studying periodical history, popular culture, or the rhythms of English prose, it is primary material to browse at leisure; for general readers, it suits light English reading in spare moments. One caveat: the original periodical was loosely organized, with no unified theme across pieces, so there is no need to read it straight through—dipping in by interest better captures its appeal.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the table of contents, pick three to five pieces that interest you, and skip reading straight through
  2. Read one or two pieces a day; mark unfamiliar words first and look them up together afterward
  3. Compare the social topics in the periodical with today and jot down differences and reactions as you go

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

FAQ

Is this book the complete periodical or a selection? It is an electronic text compiled by Project Gutenberg from the original periodical, containing many pieces but not a complete page-by-page reproduction of every issue; in organization it is closer to a selected compilation, with no unified theme across pieces.
How difficult is the English? The style is nineteenth-century popular periodical prose: sentences are long but the vocabulary is not especially difficult, suiting readers with some foundation in English extensive reading; those used to modern news English may initially need to adjust to the rhythm of the sentences.
Is it suitable for studying literary history? It can serve as supplementary material for the history of popular periodicals and popular reading, but it is not a work of literary history and lacks systematic commentary; it is better for illustrative and background reading than as a core theoretical source.

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.