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11,874 public-domain books, summarised. Page 247 of 248.

Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. I
Charles Lever
HOOK A prolific novelist’s life unfolds through his own candid correspondence, revealing the precarious, nomadic existence of a man who wrote to live while struggling to escape the shadow of his own professional reputation.

Great African Travellers: From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley
William Henry Giles Kingston
An expansive 19th-century survey of African travel, chronicling the perilous, river-borne journeys and encounters that mapped the continent's heart.

Historical Epochs of the French Revolution: With The Judgment And Execution Of Louis XVI., King Of France
Henry Goudemetz
A stark, dispassionate journal of the French Revolution lays bare how theoretical idealism rapidly degenerated into absolute public terror, relentless executions, and state-sanctioned violence.

History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12)
G. (Gaston) Maspero
A fractured region falls under the sway of ruthless imperial ambition as armies march from the Mediterranean coast to the Iranian plateau.

Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Two lovers, a Mediterranean captain and a German spy, are drawn into a web of war, betrayal, and tragic sea-bound retribution.

On Some Ancient Battle-Fields in Lancashire: And Their Historical, Legendary, and Aesthetic Associations
Charles Hardwick
A rigorous antiquarian survey traces ancient Lancashire conflict through soil, burial mounds, and local folklore to separate true history from mythical idealization.

On the Track
Henry Lawson
Life on the Australian frontier is raw, dry, and relentlessly hard, yet saved from grimness by dark humor, fierce loyalties, and the endless, easygoing talk of men who have nothing left to lose.

Papers from Lilliput
J. B. (John Boynton) Priestley
A gentle, inquisitive intelligence peers out from behind every line, transforming life's small absurdities into warm, meditative art.

Saint Joan
Bernard Shaw
This play dramatizes the life and death of a revolutionary peasant girl whose singular conviction changed the course of history, only to face a brutal, systematic destruction by the very institutions she sought to serve.

Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series
John Addington Symonds
A scholar travels through time-touched towns and landscapes, tracing how art, geography, and political ambitions forged the spirit of Mediterranean civilization.

Spanish and Portuguese South America during the Colonial Period
Robert Grant Watson
Imperial ambitions clash against wild landscapes as European powers carve out a new world across three centuries.

Strong poison
Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh) Sayers
A dead lover, a tincture of arsenic, and a woman on trial for her life leave an aristocratic sleuth fighting the clock—and his own heart—to expose the real killer.

The Children of the New Forest
Frederick Marryat
A family of orphans finds refuge in the rugged wilderness of a royal forest, learning to survive while the storm of the English Civil War rages around their hidden home.

The Golden Legend
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A dying prince accepts a farm girl's offer to lay down her life for his cure, setting off a spiritual journey across medieval Europe where demon, saint, and mortal contend for a single soul. <Image alt="Illustration of a medieval noblewoman holding a golden vessel" caption="Medieval drama of sacrifice and grace"…

The Green Carnation
Robert Hichens
A sharp satire of Victorian aestheticism, this parody captures two dandyish intellectuals spinning endless paradoxes across London drawing rooms and country gardens.

The Hampdenshire Wonder
J. D. (John Davys) Beresford
An ordinary English village faces an intellectual catastrophe when a child is born with a mind so vast that human knowledge can neither contain nor comprehend it.

The Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana
Edward Eggleston
A young schoolmaster arrives in a rugged nineteenth-century Indiana settlement, where he must win over a hostile backwoods community and clear his name after being framed for a local robbery.

The Mysteries of London, v. 2/4
George W. M. (George William MacArthur) Reynolds
A sprawling, high-octane Victorian melodrama cuts between the gleaming drawing rooms of Mayfair and the filthy, lightless cellars of London's underworld, pitting total corruption against uncompromising virtue.

The Polar World: A popular description of man and nature in the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the globe
G. (Georg) Hartwig
A sweeping survey of polar geography and human endurance, G. Hartwig’s work charts the icy extremes of both ends of the earth. It illuminates how animal life, indigenous cultures, and heroic explorers adapt to the world’s most forbidding realms.

A Journal from Japan: A Daily Record of Life as Seen by a Scientist
Marie Carmichael Stopes
A single-minded British paleobotanist charges through Edwardian Japan with microscope, hammer, and bicycle, finding as much wonder in the microscopic cells of ancient plants as in the vanishing traditions of a rapidly modernizing nation.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
When young lovers escape rigorous human laws by fleeing into an enchanted forest, they discover that nature and magic possess their own volatile, unpredictable rules.

A Popular History of Ireland
Thomas D'Arcy McGee
A bitter, brilliant account of a nation systematically dismantled, Thomas D'Arcy McGee’s history charts how centuries of confiscation, betrayal, and unyielding resistance forged modern Ireland from the ashes of its ancient principalities.

Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930
Various
A pulp magazine blends melodrama and raw imagination, taking readers from the abyss of the ocean to the depths of time.

Beyond the City
Arthur Conan Doyle
Three new households settle into a suburban cul-de-sac, where feminist iconoclasm, quiet middle-class domesticity, and financial peril collide in Arthur Conan Doyle’s spirited comedy of Victorian manners and neighborhood ties.

Carolina Lee
Lilian Bell
A proud young heiress loses her family fortune, her mobility, and her faith in God, only to rebuild all three through an unshakeable conversion to Christian Science and a return to her ancestral Southern soil.

Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom
T. W. (Thomas William) Allies
A spiritual authority born in obscurity faces the absolute power of the Roman Empire, transforming the fundamental relationship between human conscience and civil government.

Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa Harlowe stands in the balance between her family’s ruthless social ambition and a manipulative libertine’s dark schemes. Her story becomes a desperate struggle to preserve her personal integrity against a world intent on breaking her.

Deep Waters
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
Scheming dockworkers, scheming wives, and cunning old tars maneuver through the lower-class drawing rooms and muddy Thames wharves of Edwardian England, turning every domestic spat, unpaid bar tab, and stray piece of property into a battle of wits.

Five Mice in a Mouse-trap, by the Man in the Moon
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
A ethereal narrator watches over five rambunctious children, recording their daily mishaps, imaginative games, and magical midnight journeys across the globe.

Guilds in the Middle Ages
Georges François Renard
Bound to local markets, medieval guilds once safeguarded craft quality, organized labor, and protected members, yet internal corruption and expanding global trade ultimately exposed their rigidities, bringing about their total demise and setting the stage for modern industrial conflict.

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850
Various
Nineteenth-century print culture comes alive in a wide-ranging, ambitious collection designed to educate, move, and entertain a rapidly growing reading public.

Hunting Dogs: Describes in a Practical Manner the Training, Handling, Treatment, Breeds, Etc., Best Adapted for Night Hunting as Well as Gun Dogs for Daylight Sport
Oliver Hartley
A dog trained for night work must navigate pitch-black swamps, tangled thickets, and cold water while tracking elusive game. This practical manual captures the gritty reality of field sport, revealing how patient training, proper care, and hard-earned woodsman’s logic turn a raw hound into a reliable hunting partner.

If Winter Comes
A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth) Hutchinson
A gentle, reflective man who tries to understand everyone’s point of view finds his tolerance turned against him when personal scandal and wartime hysteria converge.

Intarsia and Marquetry
F. Hamilton (Frederick Hamilton) Jackson
Precision in woodcraft demands both an eye for geometry and a patience for raw materials. This survey maps the quiet, intricate evolution of wood inlay from ancient sarcophagi to modern workshops.

John Ermine of the Yellowstone
Frederic Remington
A white boy raised as a Crow warrior enters the nineteenth-century American military world, only to find that neither frontier culture can fully bridge his divided identity.

Josephine: Makers of History
John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
From a quiet childhood on a Caribbean island to the heights of European royalty, Josephine’s life was shaped by political upheaval and personal sacrifice. Her story captures the tragic vulnerability of a woman caught in the gears of dynamic history.

Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1810-1823
David Ricardo
A clash of brilliant minds transforms personal letters into a masterclass on how economic theory shapes the real world.

Library Cataloguing
John Henry Quinn
Sorting collections of books into orderly, accessible records demands absolute clarity, robust principles, and rigorous consistency. John Henry Quinn offers a practical, clear-headed guide to the mechanics, history, and judgment required to construct effective library catalogues.

Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
A fiercely independent man of science battles Victorian dogma, reshapes public education, and helps establish the modern worldview through sheer intellectual force and relentless public service.

Lonesome Town
E. S. (Ethel Smith) Dorrance
A lone Montana cowboy rides into Manhattan to settle a score with Wall Street financial shearers, only to find himself entangled in a high-society mystery of stolen heirlooms, family betrayals, and hidden treasure in Central Park.

My Wife and I
Harriet Beecher Stowe
A young journalist navigates love, career, and radical social change in Gilded Age New York.

Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands
Charles Nordhoff
A mid-nineteenth-century traveler explores the western edge of the American continent and the Kingdom of Hawaii, recording with practical curiosity how people alter landscapes, build industries, and live together.

Ophiolatreia: An Account of the Rites and Mysteries Connected with the Origin, Rise, and Development of Serpent Worship in Various Parts of the World
Edward Sellon
Before the advent of modern historical analysis, ancient cultures across every inhabited continent reached a common, striking impulse: they elevated the serpent into a sacred emblem of creation and vital power.

Original Short Stories
Guy de Maupassant
An old officer insists that every French soldier is fueled by love; an ancient mother exacts a terrible revenge; a philosopher’s corpse frightens his mourners. Human folly, cruelty, and absurdity drive this sharp collection.

Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
A festive, warm-hearted Christmas tale where an irrepressible young woman, a house full of energetic dogs, and a lonely stranger turn holiday traditions upside down.

Piano Tuning: A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs
J. Cree (Jerry Cree) Fischer
A precision manual for the working mechanic, this nineteenth-century guide demystifies the intricate mechanical inner workings, acoustic physics, and delicate practical adjustments required to bring house pianos and reed organs into perfect mathematical pitch.

Puck of Pook's Hill
Rudyard Kipling
A ancient land whispers its memories when two Sussex children accidentally summon the oldest magic in Britain.

Rabbi and Priest: A Story
Milton Goldsmith
Two Jewish boys, torn from their family in imperial Russia, navigate divergent paths through persecution, state violence, and the enduring pull of faith.