The Red Derelict
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- English-language genre-fiction readers who enjoy old-fashioned adventure and suspense
- Literature students studying late nineteenth-century English popular fiction
- Readers who want a free public-domain text for leisure reading
- Readers interested in old novels with colonial settings
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting modern suspense pacing and twist structures
- Readers sensitive to outdated attitudes and easily pulled out of the story
- Researchers who need an authoritative annotated or scholarly edition
Reading tips
- Read it as genre fiction, focusing first on plot momentum and suspense.
- After reading, compare it with other adventure novels of the same period to note similarities and differences in narrative conventions.
- When you hit passages with conspicuous period attitudes, annotate rather than skip them, so they can inform later discussion.
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
Bertram Mitford (1855–1914) was an English writer about whose life relatively little is publicly known; his work consists mainly of colonial adventure fiction. Twenty-seven of his books are held here, commonly classified under inspirational coming-of-age writing, though their actual subjects center on the South African frontier and on military conflicts and pioneering experiences among the Zulu and Matabele. Representative titles include The Sign of the Spider, The King‘s Assegai, Forging the Blades, and Aletta, whose very names evoke spiders, royal spears, blade-forging, and the Boer invasion. His style favors exotic landscapes, tense plots, and themes of masculine adventure and growth, with characters tested in strange and dangerous settings. Because public information is limited, his detailed biography cannot be firmly established, yet these works offer a glimpse of late nineteenth-century English adventure fiction.
