First published in 1885 under the title “Penny Whistles”, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses”, is a collection of sixty-five poems for children about darkness and solitude. Amongst the collection includes such classics as “Foreign Children”, “The Lamplighter”, “The Land of Counterpane”, “Bed in Summer”, “My Shadow”, and “The Swing.” Inspired by many of his personal experiences as a child, Stevenson in this collection evokes the ...
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in the middle of the 13th century and what is principally known of him comes from his own writings. One of the world’s great literary masterpieces, the “Divine Comedy” is at its heart an allegorical tale regarding man’s search for divinity. The work is divided into three sections, “Inferno”, “Purgatorio”, and “Paradiso”, each containing thirty-three cantos. It is the narrative of a journey down through ...
First serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, “Heart of Darkness” is the story of steamboat captain Charlie Marlow’s voyage into the primitive interior of the Congo of Africa. As a manager of a Belgian ivory company, Marlow travels up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, an agent of the ivory company. Deep in the interior of Africa Marlow finds Kurtz living among the savage natives who revere him as a God. While neither a critical nor financial su ...
One of Alexandre Dumas’ most beloved novels and one of the best-selling works of its day, “The Count of Monte Cristo” is an expansive adventure novel with a huge cast of characters, all revolving around the young sailor Edmond Dantes. Wrongfully accused of aiding the exiled Napoleon, Dantes is arrested on the day of his wedding and imprisoned on the island prison, Chateau d’If. He survives years of cramped confinement and eventually befriends an ...
Set during the early part of the 19th century, George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” is a work of epic scope that centers on the intersecting lives of the inhabitants of the fictitious titular town of Middlemarch. The themes of the novel are as numerous as its characters. Through the narrative of the story the author addresses the status of women, the nature of marriage, politics, religion, and education in the 19th century. The story is principally conc ...
“Great Expectations” is the classic novel by Charles Dickens that traces the life of an orphan named Pip. The novel begins on Christmas Eve 1812 where we find a seven year old Pip as he encounters an escaped convict in the cemetery where Pip’s family is buried. Pip lives with his abusive older sister, and her husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith, whom Pip works for as an apprentice. A wealthy spinster, Miss Havisham, encourages a friendship between ...
First published in the pulp magazine “All-Story Magazine” in October, 1912, “Tarzan of the Apes” is the first novel in a series of adventure novels that was so popular that it would spawn some two dozen sequels. It is the coming of age story of John Clayton, the son of an English couple, Lord and Lady Greystoke, who are marooned in the western coastal jungles of equatorial Africa. When his father is killed by the savage king ape Kerchak and his ...
First published in 1918, “My Antonia” is the final book of Willa Cather’s “prairie trilogy” of novels, preceded by “O Pioneers!” and “The Song of the Lark.” It is the classic story of the daughter of the immigrant Bohemian Shimerda family that sets out to farm the untamed prairie land of Nebraska in the late 19th century. The father of the family finds the demands of this new life unbearable. He did not want to leave his homeland where he had a ...
The second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Bible, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic anti-slavery novel. First published in 1852, the work is a seminal piece of abolitionist literature which helped spur the country towards Civil War. The story centers on the lives of several slaves of a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby. Mounting debts forces the farmer to sell two of his slaves, Uncle Tom, a middle-a ...
