Kenelm Chillingly — Volume 03

Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron, 1803-1873Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.3

Word count: 179K words
Chapters: 18

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.Kenelm Chillingly — Volume 03 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton LyttonAuthor: Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron, 1803-1873,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Mar 1, 2005

Editor's review

This is the public-domain electronic text of the third volume of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Kenelm Chillingly. The volume continues the protagonist's travels and conversations between country and city, using his encounters to display Victorian English social life, class attitudes, and moral debate. Lytton's narration combines plot movement with commentary, and the dialogue often carries a speculative edge, making the volume a useful sample of nineteenth-century English novelistic narrative. It is not a standalone story: character relationships are tightly linked to the first two volumes, and reading it alone means losing context. As a Project Gutenberg public-domain ebook, the text is easy to search and quote, suitable for close reading by researchers and for English literature enthusiasts reading volume by volume. Readers are advised to understand the whole book's structure before entering this volume and to focus on the clash of characters' ideas and the author's habit of weaving commentary into narrative.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Literature students and researchers studying nineteenth-century English fiction
English literature enthusiasts who want to read Lytton's long novel volume by volume
Writers who need a public-domain English text for searching or quotation
Readers interested in Victorian social attitudes and moral debate

Not a good fit for

Readers who want to start with this volume alone without catching up on earlier events
Casual readers who prefer fast plotting and have little patience for long stretches of commentary
Beginners whose English reading ability is not yet sufficient for nineteenth-century long sentences

Reading tips

Read volumes one and two or a summary of the whole book first, sort out the character relationships, then enter this volume.
After each chapter, summarize the core ideas in the dialogue in one or two sentences to keep track of the lines of argument.
When you hit a long sentence, mark subject, verb, and object first, then go back for parenthetical insertions to reduce reading friction.
Read alongside social descriptions in other contemporary English novels and note the author's attitudinal leanings.

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.

FAQ

Can this third volume be read on its own?

Not advisable. This volume is the third part of Kenelm Chillingly, and its character relationships and plot threads carry over from the first two volumes; starting here makes it hard to understand characters' motives and the background of the dialogue. It is best to read in order, or at least to know the earlier story's outline first.

What kind of publication is this edition?

It is a public-domain English electronic text provided by Project Gutenberg, a free ebook rather than a scholarly edition with notes and introduction. It is convenient for searching, copying, and quoting the original text, but it offers no detailed annotation, so readers may need to consult other sources for nineteenth-century background.

What level of English is needed to read this volume?

The text is nineteenth-century English with long sentences, discursive passages, and period diction, suited to readers with strong ability to read long English sentences. If you are reading to learn English, try one or two pages first to assess the vocabulary and syntax before deciding whether to read the whole volume.

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About the author

Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron, 1803-1873 Author

Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron Lytton (1803–1873) was an English novelist, playwright and politician. The library holds 220 of his works, spanning a wide range of subjects: the historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii, set against the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79; Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes, on the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo; and Eugene Aram, a narrative drawn from a criminal case. He also wrote society novels such as Pelham, the family portrait The Caxtons, and the historical study Athens: Its Rise and Fall; the short tale The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain reflects his interest in the supernatural. His style is ornate and his plots elaborate, combining romantic colouring with social satire. Public information is limited, and systematic Chinese-language appraisal of his life and work remains scarce.