Books published by publisher Royal Classics

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, a young mother and fugitive slave. The book documents Jacobs' life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced on plantations as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their families when their children might be sold away.Harriet Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narratives by using the techniques of sentimental novels to address race and gender issues. In the book, Jacobs addresses white Northern women who fail to comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution. The books' publication in 1861 coincided with the start of the American Civil War, attracting some attention as it addressed themes highlighted by the abolitionist movement.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. Tom Sawyer accompanies Huckleberry Finn to the graveyard at night, where they witness a trio of body snatchers getting into a fight. When one of the men is killed, they overhear the murderer's plans to bury a box of treasure. What follows is a an adventure of a lifetime, as Tom and Huck search for the hidden treasure.Twain named his fictional character after a San Francisco fireman whom he met in June 1863. The real Tom Sawyer was a local hero, famous for rescuing 90 passengers after a shipwreck. The two remained friendly during Twain's three-year stay in San Francisco, often drinking and gambling together. Tom Sawyer appears in three other novels by Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896).This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Huckleberry Finn runs away from the abuse of his alcoholic father. He immediately befriends a runaway slave named Jim, who is escaping the abuse of his owners. The two set out on a journey that involves theft, murder, and revenge. Along the way, Huckleberry Finn encounters Tom Sawyer, and the two hatch a plan to save Jim from a lifetime of slavery.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is often named among the great American novels. Mark Twain Highlights the immoral act of slavery by placing both Huckleberry and Jim in similar circumstances. Helping an escaped slave is in direct conflict with Huckleberry's upbringing in Missouri, but he makes a moral choice based on his valuation of friendship and human worth. This edition includes 174 illustrations by E. W. Kemble.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Notes from the Underground presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator, who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, and attacks emerging Western philosophy. The second part of the book describes certain events that appear to be destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.Notes from the Underground, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. The narration by the Underground Man is laden with ideological allusions and complex conversations regarding the political climate of the time period. Using his fiction as a weapon of ideological discourse, Dostoevsky challenges the ideologies of his time, mainly nihilism and rational egoism. The seminal influence of the work has seen a wide impact on subsequent various works in the fields of philosophy, literature, and film.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Little Women follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March - detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood. The sisters live with their mother while their father fights in the American Civil War. The family, headed by their beloved mother Marmee, must struggle to make ends meet, with the help of their kind and wealthy neighbor, Mr. Laurence, and his high spirited grandson Laurie.Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls. The novel addressed three major themes: domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity. Little Women has been read as a romance, a quest, a family drama that validates virtue over wealth, and as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

When an eccentric professor acquires an ancient book, a riddle on a spare piece of parchment tucked neatly within its pages leads him and his nephew on an unparalleled adventure. The unlocked riddle brings them to a remote mountain on Iceland, where they enter an extinct volcano on a daring quest to reach the center of the earth. They soon find themselves at a giant underground ocean where the laws of science are constantly redefined and prehistoric creatures are in abundance. But in the bowels of the Earth, a shocking discovery pits the travellers face to face with their own terrifying past.Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth has been read by millions of inquisitive minds and has influenced some of the worlds most famous explorers such as Admiral Byrd, who announced on his 1926 expedition to the North Pole that “it is Jules Verne who is bringing me.” And renowned cave explorer Norbert Casteret said in 1938 that A Journey to the Center of the Earth was a “marvelous book which impressed and fascinated me more than any other. I have re-read it many times, and I confess I sometimes re-read it still, each time finding anew the joys and enthusiasm of my childhood.”This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Poirot Investigates is a collection of eleven short stories involving the famed eccentric detective, Hercule Poirot. The problems Poirot unravels are skilfully tangled, and unravelled by the detective's omniscient genius. Throughout the tales, which include The Adventure of the Western Star, The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb, and The Kidnapped Prime Minister, Poirot must solve a variety of mysteries involving greed, jealousy, and revenge.Hercule Poirot is one of Agatha Christie's most famous and long-running characters. Poirot is most things that the conventional sleuth is not. He is witty, gallant, transparently vain, and the adroitness with which he solves a mystery has more of the manner of the prestidigitator than of the cold-blooded, relentless tracker-down of crime of most detective stories. He has a Gallic taste for the dramatic, and is convincing in the manner in which he lights upon a clue and follows it up.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

When Robin Hood became an outlaw, he decided to resist the authorities and aid his fellow man. Recruiting the help of Friar Tuck, Little John and Will Scarlet, Robin Hood fights to maintain justice until the return of King Richard the Lionheart. In the company of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, there is never a lack of action, adventure or for that matter - ale, as they outsmart the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in Sherwood Forest.Written and illustrated by Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood solidified the image of a heroic outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Having taken his material from old ballads, Pyle wove them into a cohesive story, in a colourful, invented old English idiom which preserves the flavour of the original ballads. The novel is responsible for turning Robin Hood into a staunch philanthropist, influencing writers, artists, and filmmakers ever since.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Fyodor Pavlovich’s is a 55-year-old buffoon who takes no interest in his children, and lives at the expense of others. Fyodor three son’s, the youthful Alyosha, the impetuous Dmitri, and the logical Ivan, are involved in several triangular love affairs. Throughout their encounters, the family is confronted with deep-seated philosophical issues, protestations of love, murder, and an exhilarating trial.The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel, set in 19th-century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia, with a plot which revolves around the subject of patricide. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.This cloth-bound book includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket, and is limited to 100 copies.

Though known throughout the world for his fictional novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain was also a skilled chronicler of his own life and experiences. In his youth, Twain traveled extensively throughout the untamed American West with his brother, working his way from town to town in a variety of jobs, including gold prospector, reporter, and lecturer. Roughing It is Twain's personal recollection of his wanderlust years. It is a wildly humorous adventure yarn that combines hard facts with a healthy dose of the author's unique perspective, one that helped define the course of American literature.