Books with title The People of the Abyss: Complete With 80 Original Illustrations

I really enjoyed this one. As with all of Henty's books I have read so far, this book was a page-turner. Mr. Henty has a way of making you see and feel the setting, characters and adventure. If you have not read any of his works, this may be a good one to start with. I thank Amazon for having all of these awesome 17th and 18th century authors for it users to peruse. You will not be disappointed.

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…'Set before and during the French Revolution in the cities of Paris and London, A Tale of Two Cities tells the story of Dr Manette's release from imprisonment in the Bastille and his reunion with daughter, Lucie. A French aristocrat Darnay and English lawyer Carton compete in their love for Lucie and the ensuing tale plays out against the menacing backdrop of the French Revolution and the shadow of the guillotine.

Basil is the younger son of a proud, stern father and comes of an ancient, noble family. He has a devoted younger sister, Clara, and a wild but good-natured older brother, Ralph. Travelling home, on impulse by omnibus, Basil falls in love at first sight with Margaret Sherwin, a linen-draper's daughter. He follows her home to the newly built suburbs north of Regent's Park and, after contriving a meeting, asks her father for permission to marry; but because of his own father's certain opposition, the marriage should be kept secret. Mr Sherwin agrees on condition that the marriage takes place within the week but is not consummated for one year, since Margaret is only just seventeen. The delay will give Basil time to persuade his father to accept the marriage, and he cannot be forced to withdraw from it. The marriage duly takes place and Basil spends the next few months visiting Margaret every evening under the supervision of the mildly deranged Mrs Sherwin. He tries unsuccessfully to improve Margaret's mind and after overhearing two of her tantrums begins to doubt her character.Sherwin's confidential clerk, Robert Mannion, returns from a business trip to France. Mannion's previous background is cloaked in secrecy and he has a strange power over the family. Nevertheless, he professes friendship and uses his influence for Basil's benefit. After a strained visit to his father's country house, Basil returns to find both Margaret and Mannion changed. On the evening before his year's 'probation' is completed, Basil is disconcerted that Margaret has gone to a party and will be escorted home by Mannion. He decides to collect her himself but sees her leave early with his rival. Basil follows them to a hotel and through a thin partition wall hears Mannion seduce Margaret. Basil waits and attacks Mannion, hurling him to the ground with such force that he is permanently disfigured and loses the sight of one eye. Basil collapses into delirium.On recovering, he realizes that Margaret is as much to blame as Mannion, despite threatening letters from Sherwin defending her. Basil confesses the ignoble marriage to his father who disowns him, tearing his name from the record in the family Bible. Mannion writes from hospital, revealing his secret past. When his father, a gentleman who lived beyond his means, was to be hanged for forgery, his patron, Basil's father, refused to intervene. Mannion had lived a miserable existence under assumed names until a friend arranged employment with Sherwin where he made himself indispensable. He had watched Margaret develop and despite her deceitful nature regarded her as his prize. Basil's marriage had compounded the family offence and Mannion resolved to take revenge by ruining his happiness and reputation.Ralph returns from the Continent and visits Sherwin to buy his silence. He fortuitously obtains a letter written by Mannion which confirms Margaret's guilt. Margaret, visiting Mannion in hospital, contracts typhus from which she dies. Basil sees her when she is at the point of death, forgives her and leaves London for Cornwall. Mannion forces him to leave the fishing village where he is staying and confronts him on the cliff tops. While gloating over his revenge, Mannion falls to his death on the rocks below. The shock causes Basil to collapse. He is brought back to London by Ralph and Clara and reconciled with his father. After writing his history, Basil retires to the country to live quietly with Clara.

Captain Crewe, a wealthy English widower, has been raising his only child, Sara, in India where he is stationed with the British Army. Because the Indian climate is considered too harsh for children, British families living there traditionally send their children to boarding school back home in England. The captain enrolls his young daughter at Miss Minchin's boarding school for girls in London, and dotes on his daughter so much that he orders and pays the headmistress for special treatment and exceptional luxuries for Sara, such as a private room for her with a personal maid and a separate sitting room (see Parlour boarder), along with Sara's own private carriage and a pony. Miss Minchin openly fawns over Sara for her money, but secretly and jealously despises her for her wealth.Despite her privilege, Sara is neither arrogant nor snobbish, but rather kind, generous and clever. She extends her friendship to Ermengarde, the school dunce; to Lottie, a four-year-old student given to tantrums; and to Becky, the lowly, stunted fourteen-year-old scullery maid. When Sara acquires the epithet “Princess,” she embraces its favorable elements in her natural goodheartedness.After some time, Sara's birthday is celebrated at Miss Minchin's with a lavish party, attended by all her friends and classmates. Just as it ends, Miss Minchin learns of Captain Crewe's unfortunate demise. Furthermore, prior to his death, the previously wealthy captain had lost his entire fortune; a friend had persuaded him to cash in his investments and deposit the proceeds to develop a network of diamond mines. The scheme fails, and Sara is left an orphan and a pauper, with no other family and nowhere to go. Miss Minchin is left with a sizable unpaid bill for Sara's school fees and luxuries, including her birthday party. Infuriated and pitiless, she takes away all of Sara's possessions (except for some old frocks and one doll), makes her live in a cold and poorly furnished attic, and forces her to earn her keep by working as an errand girl. She forces Sara to wear frocks much too short for her, with her thin legs peeking out of the brief skirts.For the next several years, Sara is abused by Miss Minchin and the other servants, except for Becky. Miss Minchin's kind-hearted sister, Amelia, deplores the way that Sara is treated, but is too weak-willed to speak up about it. Sara is starved, worked for long hours, sent out in all weathers, poorly dressed in outgrown and worn-out clothes, and deprived of warmth or a comfortable bed in the attic. Despite her hardships, Sara is consoled by her friends and uses her imagination to cope, pretending she is a prisoner in the Bastille or a princess disguised as a servant. Sara also continues to be kind and polite to everyone, including those who treat her badly. One day, she finds a coin in the street and uses it to buy buns at a bakery, but despite being very hungry, she gives most of the buns away to a beggar girl dressed in rags who is hungrier than herself. The bakery shop owner sees this and wants to reward Sara, but she has disappeared, so the shop owner instead gives the beggar girl bread and warm shelter for Sara's sake.Meanwhile, Mr. Carrisford and his Indian assistant Ram Dass have moved into the house next door to Miss Minchin's school. Carrisford had been Captain Crewe's friend and partner in the diamond mines. After the diamond mine venture failed, both Crewe and Carrisford became very ill, and Carrisford in his delirium abandoned his friend Crewe, who died of his "brain fever". As it turned out, the diamond mines did not fail, but instead were a great success, making Carrisford extremely rich. Although Carrisford survived, he suffers from several ailments and is guilt-ridden over abandoning his friend. He is determined to find Crewe's daughter and heir, although he does not know where she is and thinks she is attending school in France.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first published in 1873. It satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. Although not one of Twain's best-known works, it has appeared in more than 100 editions since its original publication. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast. The book is remarkable for two reasons—it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. The novel gave the era its name: the period of U.S. history from the 1870s to about 1900 is now referred to as the Gilded Age.The term gilded age, commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595): "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess." (Act IV, scene 2) Gilding gold, which would be to put gold on top of gold, is excessive and wasteful, characteristics of the age Twain and Warner wrote about in their novel. Another interpretation of the title, of course, is the contrast between an ideal "Golden Age" and a less worthy "Gilded Age", as gilding is only a thin layer of gold over baser metal, so the title now takes on a pejorative meaning as to the novel's time, events and people.The novel concerns the efforts of a poor rural family to become affluent by selling in a timely manner the 75,000 acres (300 km2) of unimproved land acquired by their patriarch, Silas "Si" Hawkins. After several adventures in Tennessee, the family fails to sell the land and Si Hawkins dies. The rest of the Hawkins story line focuses on their beautiful adopted daughter Laura. In the early 1870s, she travels to Washington, D.C. to become a lobbyist. With a senator's help, she enters society and attempts to persuade congressmen to require the federal government to purchase the land.A parallel story written by Warner concerns two young upperclass men, Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, who seek their fortunes in land in a novel way. They make a journey with a group intent on surveying land in Tennessee in order to acquire it for speculation. Philip is good-natured but plodding. He is in love with Ruth Bolton, an aspiring physician and feminist. Henry is a born salesman, charming but superficial.The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society, illustrated by the Hawkinses as well as Ruth's well-educated father, who nevertheless cannot resist becoming enmeshed in self-evidently dubious money-making schemes.The Hawkins sections, including several humorous sketches, were written by Twain. Examples are the steamboat race that leads to a wreck (Chapter IV) and Laura's toying with a clerk in a Washington bookstore (Chapter XXXVI). Notable too is the comic presence throughout the book of the eternally optimistic and eternally broke Colonel Beriah Sellers, a Micawber-like character. The character was named Escol Sellers in the first edition and changed to Beriah when an actual George Escol Sellers of Philadelphia objected. A real Beriah Sellers then turned up, causing Twain to use the name Mulberry Sellers in The American Claimant. The Sellers character was modeled after James Lampton, Twain's maternal cousin, and the land-purchase plot parallels Twain's father's purchase of a Tennessee parcel whose prospective sale, Twain wrote in his autobiography "kept us hoping and hoping, during 40 years, and forsook us at last."

Charles Dickens’s first novel, “The Pickwick Papers” was originally published in serial form between March 1836 and October 1837. Drawing on Dickens’s experience as a journalist and reporter in London and the surrounding countryside, the novel is a series of loosely related comical adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club, founded by the novel’s main character, Mr. Samuel Pickwick. Mr. Pickwick is a wealthy and bored old gentleman who suggests that he and the club members, Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass, and Nathaniel Winkle, venture outside London and report on their experiences to each other. From encounters with highwaymen, a duel, romantic escapades, and a brief stay in Fleet Prison, these wild and hilarious adventures form the basis of the novel’s plot. “The Pickwick Papers” gained immense popularity and became one of the first publishing successes of the pre-Victorian era when the character of Sam Weller was introduced in Chapter Ten. Sam is hired on as Mr. Pickwick’s valet and his wise Cockney observations and advice stand in contrast to the naïve and unworldly Mr. Pickwick. Through its numerous well-loved characters and settings, the novel affords the reader a fascinating and entertaining glimpse into 19th century England.

The Prince and the Pauper is an English-language novel by American author Mark Twain. It was first published in 1881 in Canada before its 1882 publication in the United States. The book represents Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. Set in 1547, the novel tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London; and Edward VI of England, son of Henry VIII of England.The novel begins with Tom Canty, an impoverished boy living with his abusive family in London. One day Tom Canty and Edward VI of England Prince Edward, the son of King Henry VIII and Jane Seymour meet and as a jest, switch clothes. While dressed in the pauper's rags, the Prince leaves the palace to punish the guard who knocked Tom down. However, the boys look remarkably alike and because they switch clothes, the palace guards throw the prince out into the street. The Prince fares poorly in London because he insists on proclaiming his identity as the true Prince of Wales. Meanwhile despite Tom's repeated denial of his birthright, the court and the King insist that he is the true prince gone mad. Edward eventually runs into Tom's family and a gang of thieves and Twain illustrates England's unfair and barbaric justice system. After the death of Henry VIII, Edward interrupts Tom's coronation and the boys explain, switch places, and Edward is crowned King of England.

There are dreadful -- perhaps scurrilous -- rumors about the Borgias of renaissance Italy, and here Dumas, author of such classics as THE THREE MUSKETEERS, in his Celebrated Crimes series, dishes up the dirt in all its ugly glory. This book was not written for children. Dumas has minced no words in describing the violent scenes of a violent time. From 1839 to 1841, Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history. He featured Beatrice Cenci, Martin Guerre, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, as well as more recent events and criminals, including the cases of the alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine FranCois Desrues, who were executed.

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune or rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

Prisoner of Zenda (1894), by Anthony Hope, is an adventure novel in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Political forces within the realm are such that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania who resembles the monarch is persuaded to act as his political decoy in an effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum.

The story starts in 1784, before the French revolution. Wealthy Paul Déroulède has offended the young Vicomte de Marny by speaking disrespectfully of his latest infatuation, Adèle de Monterchéri. Déroulède had not intended to get into the quarrel but has a tendency to blunder into things -- "no doubt a part of the inheritance bequeathed to him by his bourgeois ancestry."Incensed at the slur on Adèle, whom he sees as a paragon of virtue, the Vicomte challenges Déroulède to a duel, a fight which Déroulède does not want - for he knows and respects the boy's father, the Duc de Marny. Swords drawn, the fight ensues in the centre of the salon but despite his noble lineage, the Vicomte de Marny is no match for Déroulède's swordplay, especially when addled with wine and rage. Déroulède disarms his opponent and having won the duel, draws back but the boy refuses to back down without complete satisfaction and demands that Déroulède get down on his knees and apologize.Finally losing his temper with the young Vicomte, Déroulède raises his sword to disarm his protagonist once more, however de Marny lunges wildly at his opponent's breast and manages to literally throw himself on Déroulède's weapon. The boy is dead and Déroulède can do nothing but leave the establishment.On hearing of the death of his only son, the Duc de Marny (by now a cripple and almost a dotard) is distraught. The Duc summons his fourteen-year-old daughter, Juliette, to his side and forces her to swear an oath to ruin Déroulede in revenge for her brother's death, telling her that her brother's soul will remain in torment until the final judgement day should she break her promise.The story picks up ten years later, and Citizen Déroulède, though no longer rich, is a lawyer popular with the people and is allowed to go his own way, for Marat has said of him "Il n'est pas dangereux". He leads a quiet life, living alone with his mother and his orphaned cousin Anne Mie in the Rue Ecole de Médecine.At 6 pm on August 19, 1793, Juliette Marny walks into the Rue Ecole de Médecine and stopping just outside the house belonging to Citizen-Deputy Déroulède, suddenly starts to draw attention to herself, invoking the anger of the crowd through her proud aristocratic manner. She hammers on Déroulède's door as the crowd shout and lash out at her, but just before they can drag her away, the door opens and she is pulled inside.Having tricked her way into Déroulede's home Juliette is invited to stay for her own safety. She agrees and eventually reveals her identity, but even after hearing Déroulede's side of the story, she fails to realise that he only wishes to make amends for the death of her brother and continues to plot revenge on her host.Unaware of her intentions, Déroulede tells Juliette that he has accepted the post of Governor of the Conciergerie prison where Queen Marie Antoinette is imprisoned. Later he is visited at home by Sir Percy Blakeney and Juliette overhears Sir Percy warning his friend off a scheme to free the queen, for it is doomed to failure. He advises Déroulede to burn a bundle of papers relating to the plot, which if found would result in him being arrested for treason and sentenced to death.

The myths given in this paper are part of a large body of material collected among the Cherokee, chiefly in successive field seasons from 1887 to 1890, inclusive, and comprising more or less extensive notes, together with original Cherokee manuscripts, relating to the history, archeology, geographic nomenclature, personal names, botany, medicine, arts, home life, religion, songs, ceremonies, and language of the tribe. It is intended that this material shall appear from time to time in a series of papers which, when finally brought together, shall constitute a monograph upon the Cherokee Indians. This paper may be considered the first of the series, all that has hitherto appeared being a short paper upon the sacred formulas of the tribe, published in the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau in 1891 and containing a synopsis of the Cherokee medico-religious theory, with twenty-eight specimens selected from a body of about six hundred ritual formulas written down in the Cherokee language and alphabet by former doctors of the tribe and constituting altogether the largest body of aboriginal American literature in existence.Although the Cherokee are probably the largest and most important tribe in the United States, having their own national government and numbering at any time in their history from 20,000 to 25,000 persons, almost nothing has yet been written of their history or general ethnology, as compared with the literature of such northern tribes as the Delawares, the Iroquois, or the Ojibwa. The difference is due to historical reasons which need not be discussed here.It might seem at first thought that the Cherokee, with their civilized code of laws, their national press, their schools and seminaries, are so far advanced along the white man’s road as to offer but little inducement for ethnologic study. This is largely true of those in the Indian Territory, with whom the enforced deportation, two generations ago, from accustomed scenes and surroundings did more at a single stroke to obliterate Indian ideas than could have been accomplished by fifty years of slow development. There remained behind, however, in the heart of the Carolina mountains, a considerable body, outnumbering today such well-known western tribes as the Omaha, Pawnee, Comanche, and Kiowa, and it is among these, the old conservative Kitu′hwa element, that the ancient things have been preserved. Mountaineers guard well the past, and in the secluded forests of Nantahala and Oconaluftee, far away from the main-traveled road of modern progress, the Cherokee priest still treasures the legends and repeats the mystic rituals handed down from his ancestors. There is change indeed in dress and outward seeming, but the heart of the Indian is still his own.