The Boy Slaves

Reid, Mayne, 1818-1883Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
543K words
Chapters
55

Tags

English Originals Children's Literature Survival ChallengeAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneVengeance and GratitudeSea AdventureCourage and GrowthSouth PacificExotic CultureColonial EraYouth Reading

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 Boy Slaves by Mayne ReidAuthor: Reid, Mayne, 1818-1883,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: Feb 3, 2008

Editor's review

Mayne Reid was a 19th-century British writer of adventure fiction, and The Boy Slaves falls under his juvenile belles lettres. The English original is freely available from Project Gutenberg. The story centers on boys and the theme of slavery and carries the typical style of Victorian adventure narrative: fast plotting, vivid scenes, and a clear line between good and evil, making it an accessible sample for understanding 19th-century English-language adventure literature for young readers. The value of the Gutenberg edition lies in its public text and zero-barrier access, which can be used for comparative study of the layout of early ebooks. Readers are advised to approach it as literature in its historical context, noting the era's limitations reflected in its depictions of servitude, race, and the other, rather than treating it as a contemporary coming-of-age guide. For English learners, the sentence structures are not too complex, so it can serve as graded reading material; for researchers, it is a case study of popular literature intertwined with abolitionist discourse.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read one chapter of the original first, then consult historical background material, noting the author's stance in narrating scenes of slavery.
  2. English learners can read two to three pages a day and copy short sentences describing actions and scenes to imitate in writing.
  3. Read alongside abolitionist literature of the same period and discuss how adventure narratives carry social issues.

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
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55

FAQ

Is this book suitable as English reading material for children directly? Use caution. This is a 19th-century work, and its depictions of slavery and race carry the prejudices of its time, which young readers may lack the ability to assess. If giving it to a child, parents should read it through first, or choose an edition with an introduction and notes, and discuss the historical context with the child while reading.
What is special about the Gutenberg edition? Project Gutenberg is the earliest project providing free ebooks, launched by Michael Hart in 1971. This book is its public-domain English text, free to access and plainly formatted, suitable as primary material for reading and studying electronic texts, but it usually contains no modern introduction or notes.
Can someone with average English read this book? This is an adventure novel for young readers with relatively direct sentence structures, but it retains 19th-century vocabulary and syntax. Readers with intermediate English can try it, preferably with a dictionary and background material, reading chapter summaries before the original text to avoid giving up due to dense unfamiliar words.

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About the author

Reid, Mayne, 1818-1883 Author

Mayne Reid (1818–1883) was a prolific nineteenth-century writer of English-language adventure fiction. Details of his life are limited in publicly available sources; what is relatively reliable is that he was born in 1818 and died in 1883. The library holds 57 of his works, commonly classified as inspirational coming-of-age stories, which shows that his writing centered on adventure and growth for young readers. Representative works include The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas, set on the Texas frontier, along with Ran Away to Sea, The Forest Exiles, The Desert Home, The Maroon, The Quadroon, and The Land of Fire, which carry readers to the Amazon jungle, the wilderness, the sea, and the Far West. His novels feature tight plots and wide-open settings, often depicting separated families, survival in foreign lands, and youthful adventure; they were widely read in the English-speaking world and have had some influence on later adventure literature.