The Slave of the Mine or, Jack Harkaway in 'Frisco

Hemyng, Bracebridge, 1841-1901Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 1.9
Word count
107K words
Chapters
11

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Adventure JourneyVengeance and GratitudeJianghu FeudHeroismComing of AgeExotic 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 Slave of the Mine; or, Jack Harkaway in 'Frisco by Bracebridge HemyngAuthor: Hemyng, Bracebridge, 1841-1901,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Aug 22, 2014

Editor's review

The Slave of the Mine; or, Jack Harkaway in 'Frisco is one volume in the Jack Harkaway series by Bracebridge Hemyng, a nineteenth-century British writer of popular boys' adventure fiction; the story places its hero in Gold Rush San Francisco, with mine slavery and adventure as its main threads. Its value today lies less in literary craft than in the sample it offers of Victorian boys' magazine serial culture: fast-moving plots, chapter-ending suspense, clear-cut good and evil, and pronounced period markings, including popularized treatment of mine labor, the urban margins, and colonial imagination. As a public-domain electronic text from Project Gutenberg, it is convenient for researchers to search the original and suitable for general readers to browse as a historical document. It is best approached as a cultural artifact rather than a modern young-adult novel: attend both to the pacing of adventure narrative and to its old-fashioned statements about labor, race, and class, and you will understand the logic of its popularity then and its limitations now.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one chapter first to get a sense of the narrative pace, then decide whether to continue; there is no need to finish it in one sitting.
  2. Mark passages dealing with mine labor and the urban poor as material for notes on cultural history.
  3. Read alongside other boys' adventure serials of the same era to observe similarities and differences in formula and intended readership.
  4. With the English original, read slowly with a dictionary and focus on the idioms of nineteenth-century popular English.

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

FAQ

Is this suitable as an English reader for children? It is not recommended for young children to read directly. It is a nineteenth-century boys' adventure serial: the plot centers on good versus evil, but it includes heavy material such as mine slavery and carries clear prejudices of its era. If used for English study, an adult should preview it, select suitable chapters, and provide background explanation.
Why is it considered valuable as historical material? It preserves the typical methods of Victorian popular serials—short chapters, strong suspense, flat characters—and reflects contemporary readers' imaginings of overseas gold rushes, mine labor, and the urban underclass. In studying the history of popular reading or colonial-era popular culture, such texts reveal ordinary readers' tastes better than classic literature does.
Do I need to know the earlier books in the series first? No. The Jack Harkaway volumes are relatively independent, and this one centers on the San Francisco mine experience, so it can be read on its own. If you want to follow changes in the characters' relationships, you can look up other volumes in the series for comparison.
Anything to note when reading the electronic edition? This is a public-domain text from Project Gutenberg, laid out mainly as plain text and possibly lacking modern annotations. Use reading software that supports dictionary lookup and annotation; consult a dictionary for old spellings or slang, and note uncertain points rather than struggling over every word.

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

Hemyng, Bracebridge, 1841-1901 Author

Hemyng, Bracebridge (1841–1901) was a nineteenth-century British author of popular adventure fiction. Public information about him is limited, and many details of his life remain unclear. Judging from the five works held in this collection, he built a series of stories around the boy hero Jack Harkaway and his son, with settings ranging from New York and Turkey to Greece, the Red Sea, and San Francisco. The plots involve the adventures of the Travelers' Club, encounters with brigands, fights against pirates, and slavery in the mines. Such works are characterized by exotic settings, brisk action, and a steady succession of perilous episodes; they belong to the cheap adventure fiction produced for young readers in the Victorian era, often circulated in serial or part-issue form. The Jack Harkaway series had some influence on juvenile readers of the time and has since become a sample for scholars studying the genre of British popular boys' adventure fiction.