Haviland's Chum

Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
320K words
Chapters
32

Tags

English Originals Suspense ThrillerAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneJianghu FeudComplex HumanityExotic 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.Haviland's Chum by Bertram MitfordAuthor: Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Jun 20, 2010

Editor's review

Haviland's Chum is a boys' adventure novel by the British author Bertram Mitford, a public-domain ebook organized by Project Gutenberg. Mitford was known for adventure stories set in colonial contexts, and this book continues the typical temper of the genre: exotic settings, male comradeship, sudden crises, and moral tests interwoven, with a brisk pace and plots driven by action rather than psychological elaboration. Its value is twofold: as a sample of late Victorian boys' reading, it shows how courage, loyalty, and manliness were shaped at the time; as a case of colonial adventure fiction, it invites discussion of its regional imagination and period biases. Note that its depictions of other cultures and peoples carry clear period limitations and should be read today with critical distance. It suits genre study or English extensive reading rather than use as historical record.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to grasp the character relationships and main adventure line, then decide whether to read through.
  2. Excerpt the regional descriptions and character judgments separately, and take critical notes against colonial history.
  3. For English extensive reading, do not look up every new word; prioritize narrative continuity.
  4. Read alongside other adventure novels of the same period to compare genre conventions and values.

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

FAQ

Is this a series or a standalone story? From available information it is a single adventure novel by Mitford, telling a complete story around Haviland and his chum; it is not a series to be read in order. For specific character relationships and plot development, refer to the text itself.
Could the colonial depictions be uncomfortable? Possibly. Late Victorian adventure novels of this kind often write foreign lands as backgrounds to be conquered and depict local people with stereotypes. Read it as a historical text and attend to its period discourse rather than treating it as a basis for value judgments.
What English level does it require? Upper-intermediate. The narrative moves through action and dialogue; new words relate mostly to seafaring, the outdoors, and old-fashioned life, and long sentences are not dense. Readers with a college English foundation accustomed to originals can try it, ideally with a dictionary.

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

Mitford, Bertram, 1855-1914 Author

Bertram Mitford (1855–1914) was an English writer about whose life relatively little is publicly known; his work consists mainly of colonial adventure fiction. Twenty-seven of his books are held here, commonly classified under inspirational coming-of-age writing, though their actual subjects center on the South African frontier and on military conflicts and pioneering experiences among the Zulu and Matabele. Representative titles include The Sign of the Spider, The King‘s Assegai, Forging the Blades, and Aletta, whose very names evoke spiders, royal spears, blade-forging, and the Boer invasion. His style favors exotic landscapes, tense plots, and themes of masculine adventure and growth, with characters tested in strange and dangerous settings. Because public information is limited, his detailed biography cannot be firmly established, yet these works offer a glimpse of late nineteenth-century English adventure fiction.