The Iron Horse
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Middle school and university students who want to practice reading English originals and prefer adventure stories
- Readers studying 19th-century British juvenile literature and railway-themed fiction
- Parents or teachers looking for classic English public-domain reading for children
- Popular-science readers interested in steam locomotives and early railway history
Not a good fit for
- Adult fiction readers seeking modern pacing and complex character psychology
- Readers with weak English who cannot read the original even with a dictionary
Reading tips
- Read a chapter through first to grasp the characters and setting, then look up unfamiliar words instead of stopping at every one.
- Note railway- and locomotive-related vocabulary as you read to build up 19th-century industrial English.
- Read it alongside other adventure novels of the period and note differences in how the theme of growing up is handled.
- For parent-child reading, read aloud in sections, retell the plot in Chinese, then discuss the characters' choices.
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
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
FAQ
Is this book suitable for English beginners to read directly?
Is the book heavily about railway technology?
Why recommend reading the public-domain ebook?
Comments
Find this book
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
Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825–1894) was a Scottish writer of children's literature, born in Edinburgh. At sixteen he went to Canada and worked for the Hudson's Bay Company for six years, an experience that later supplied material for his adventure stories; after returning to Scotland in 1847 he devoted himself to writing and produced more than a hundred adventure novels, of which ninety-seven are held in this collection. His representative works include The Coral Island, The Dog Crusoe and his Master, Black Ivory, The Lighthouse and Martin Rattler, mostly drawing on seafaring, desert-island and frontier adventure, with tight plots and solid detail that combine instruction with appeal for young readers. He was also skilled in watercolour painting. Public information on his early education and private life is limited.
