Letters to Children
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- English learners who want to read a short English source text and practice reading epistolary writing
- Readers studying nineteenth-century missionary documents and educational writing for children
- General readers interested in the style of early English children's literature
Not a good fit for
- Child readers expecting a continuous story or adventure plot
- Parents seeking guidance on modern children's education
- Readers uncomfortable with a tone of religious exhortation
Reading tips
- Read one or two letters a day; read through first, then look up unfamiliar words, keeping the rhythm of the epistolary form.
- Note down the object of exhortation and the method of example in each letter, and observe its structure of argument.
- Read with the nineteenth-century missionary background in mind; mark period-specific expressions and return to them later.
- Read aloud to appreciate the tone and pauses of plain English in the epistolary form.
About the publisher
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
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FAQ
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About the author
E. C. Bridgman (Elijah Coleman Bridgman, 1801–1861) was a Protestant missionary in China in the nineteenth century and one of the earlier Western authors who wrote in Chinese for Chinese readers. Public information about his life is limited, and the library holds only one of his works, Letters to Children. Judging from the title and genre, the book is addressed to children in epistolary form, with a friendly tone and simple moral and educational content, reflecting the author's approach of conveying ideas through accessible reading matter and drawing closer to young readers. Such epistolary children's literature was relatively rare among Western writers in China at the time and thus has some significance for the history of the book and publishing. This note is based only on the library's records and well-established common knowledge, without further inference about his career or achievements.
