The Convict: A Tale
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy nineteenth-century English romance and popular fiction
- Those interested in narrative motifs such as crime and punishment and reversals of identity
- Students and teachers studying Victorian popular literature and public-domain texts
- Patient readers accustomed to reading in segments and mapping character relationships
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer contemporary tight suspense pacing and short chapters
- Readers impatient with nineteenth-century narrative style and moral commentary
- Readers seeking strict historical accuracy rather than romanticized plotting
Reading tips
- First map the main characters' relationships to the "convict" identity before entering the plot, so as not to be slowed by the nineteenth-century narrative pace.
- Read one or two chapters a day, then summarize the events and characters' motives in your own words to keep the threads clear.
- Read alongside brief material on nineteenth-century British fiction publishing to understand its romance mode and moral commentary.
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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About the author
George Payne Rainsford James was a British historical novelist. Born in London in 1801 and died in Venice in 1860, he received the title of Royal Historiographer in 1837 and later served as British consul in the United States and consul-general in Venice. He wrote more than a hundred volumes of historical fiction; this collection holds 50 of his works, including Richelieu: A Tale of France, The Old Dominion, Arabella Stuart: A Romance from English History, Forest Days, and The Convict: A Tale. His fiction is mostly drawn from English and European history, placing fictional characters within real historical events, with detailed plotting and a romantic, legendary flavour. Public information is limited, and details of his life and critical assessment of his works remain to be further examined.
