Baconian Essays

Smithson, E. W. (Edward Walter), active 19th centuProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 1.7
Word count
349K words
Chapters
35

Tags

English Originals Critical ThinkingEnglish ThoughtAcademic StudyIntellectual CommentaryKnowledge PopularizationEssays and Notes

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.Baconian Essays by active 19th century E. W. SmithsonAuthor: Smithson, E. W. (Edward Walter), active 19th century,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Mar 18, 2018

Editor's review

This book is a collection of "Baconian essays" by the nineteenth-century author E. W. Smithson, a work of English literature (class PR) made available as a free ebook by Project Gutenberg. Its value lies not in offering contemporary scholarly conclusions but in presenting the style and thematic interests of nineteenth-century English essays: the pieces are mostly short, develop from a chosen theme, and interweave argument with example, making the book a useful specimen for observing the modern English prose tradition. While reading, focus on how the author organizes arguments, how he uses metaphor and quotation to support judgments, and the tone and measure of the essay as a genre in that era. Being a historical text, some views and expressions carry the limitations of their time; readers should read with a critical eye, treating it as evidence for literary and intellectual history rather than a practical guide. The electronic edition is easy to search and excerpt, and suits reading in installments on a commute or between classes.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and the first essay to grasp the book's thematic range and the author's tone, then choose essays for close reading.
  2. After each essay, summarize the argument and examples in two or three sentences to train in extracting the structure of English argumentative prose.
  3. Mark historical allusions or unfamiliar expressions as you go, then look them up after finishing the essay to avoid breaking the rhythm.

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

FAQ

Was this book written by Bacon himself? No. "Baconian" in the title refers to writing in imitation of, or on themes related to, the Baconian essay style and topics; the author is the nineteenth-century E. W. Smithson, not Francis Bacon himself. Readers should not take the views in the book as Bacon's own words.
How difficult is the English? It is nineteenth-century English prose, with rather long sentences, formal diction, and scattered allusions and quotations; overall it is harder than modern popular writing. Readers with some English foundation and experience with long argumentative texts will find it easier to enter; beginners may use annotations or start with the shorter essays.
How is the electronic edition best used? The Project Gutenberg edition allows full-text search and easy excerpting, making it suitable for reading by topic, taking reading notes, or selecting passages for classroom discussion. If quoting, check the essay and original page information, and keep the text's historical context in mind.

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

Smithson, E. W. (Edward Walter), active 19th centu Author

E. W. Smithson (full name Edward Walter Smithson) was an English author active in the nineteenth century. Public sources offer very little information about his life; his dates of birth and death, nationality and personal career are not clearly recorded. The only work by him confirmed in the present catalogue is Baconian Essays. Judging by its title, the book belongs to argumentative writing on Francis Bacon and the so-called Baconian cipher theory, forming part of the nineteenth-century "Baconian" literature in the debate over the authorship of Shakespeare's works. Works of this kind typically combine essays, textual scholarship and conjecture, and carry a strongly polemical tone, seeking to support the Baconian authorship hypothesis with textual and historical evidence. Smithson's volume therefore has value chiefly as a historical document and as material for the history of scholarship, useful to readers studying the Shakespeare–Bacon controversy rather than as a widely known classic.