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34,093 public-domain books, summarised. Page 574 of 711.

The Young Castellan: A Tale of the English Civil War
George Manville Fenn
The fate of a historic castle rests in the hands of a boy, whose desperate preparations to defend his home against an encroaching civil war reveal the true cost of loyalty.

The Young Cavalier: A Story of the Civil Wars
Percy F. (Percy Francis) Westerman
A young Royalist escapes the wreckage of his family’s ancestral home, joining a desperate band of loyalists to navigate the perilous, shifting tides of the English Civil War.

Theodor Leschetizky
Annette Hullah
The keyboard becomes a gateway to the soul under the exacting, spirited guidance of a master who demands nothing less than total concentration from those who seek his tutelage.

Tommy Tregennis
Mary Elizabeth Phillips
The golden sands of a Cornish seaside town hold a world that is at once vast and fragile for a young boy discovering the limits of his own small life.

Under the Storm
Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge
In a landscape torn by civil conflict, a young boy accepts a solemn charge that will define his life, testing his loyalties and his endurance as his world is systematically undone.

Vacation Camping for Girls
Jeannette Augustus Marks
This guide provides practical instruction for young women venturing into the wilderness, emphasizing self-reliance, physical health, and the mastery of outdoor living. It demystifies the complications of camp life through a blend of technical advice and character-building philosophy.

Waltoniana: Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton
Izaak Walton
An honest, unadorned legacy of a life well-lived, these scattered remains reveal the private heart of a man whose quiet devotion to friends and faith echoed far beyond his own century. This collection gathers the occasional prose, elegies, and personal documents of a writer best remembered for his contemplative…

Watch-Dogs: Ship's Company, Part 5
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
The quiet lanes of the English countryside are rarely as peaceful as they seem, especially when a well-meaning visitor decides to teach the locals a lesson in virtue. This story follows the inhabitants of the village of Claybury, whose quiet, beer-sipping rhythm is upended by an outsider’s misguided attempt to…

What We Saw in Egypt
Anonymous
This mid-nineteenth-century travelogue offers a Victorian window into the wonders of Egypt, framed by the awe of a family experiencing the ancient world through the lens of their Christian faith.

Why crime does not pay
Sophie Lyons
A seasoned underworld veteran recounts a lifetime of high-stakes larceny, offering a gritty, unvarnished look at the inevitable failure of a criminal life.

With the Indians in the Rockies
James Willard Schultz
A young boy’s journey into the wild becomes a profound test of endurance, friendship, and survival alongside a resilient Blackfeet companion. This memoir of the American frontier captures the raw, unforgiving beauty of the Rockies through the eyes of two youths forced to mature in the face of mortal danger.

Yule-Tide Yarns
Unknown
This anthology gathers high-stakes tales of duty, survival, and colonial adventure, offering a window into the late-Victorian appetite for grit and heroism in the face of the unknown.

A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless: In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren
Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
A woman pens a series of letters to her grandchildren, meticulously preserving the memory of their grandfather to ensure his character serves as a lasting moral compass for generations to come.

A Busy Year at the Old Squire's
C. A. (Charles Asbury) Stephens
A chronicle of rural Maine life, this narrative captures the ingenuity, resilience, and quiet adventures of a nineteenth-century farming family through the changing seasons.

A Century of Roundels
Algernon Charles Swinburne
This collection of one hundred roundels serves as a delicate, rhythmic meditation on the cycles of life, the inevitability of death, and the persistent, healing power of music and memory. It is a work of formal precision, using the constraints of the roundel—a repeating, circular structure—to mirror the repetitive,…

A Cigarette-Maker's Romance
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
An impoverished Russian aristocrat clings to a delusion of returning to his lost fortune while working in a Munich cigarette factory, sustained only by the quiet devotion of a woman who loves him.

A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 4, part 1: William Henry Harrison
Unknown
This archival record captures the abrupt transition of power following the sudden death of a President, illuminating the early constitutional uncertainties of the American Republic.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 1
Mark Twain
A modern factory superintendent, knocked unconscious by a brutal blow, awakens to find himself transported back to the legendary, sword-swinging world of King Arthur’s sixth-century Camelot.

A Thane of Wessex: Being a Story of the Great Viking Raids into Somerset
Charles W. (Charles Watts) Whistler
A disgraced young nobleman loses his status and home, only to rise as a vital defender of Wessex against the encroaching Viking fleets. His journey of redemption tests his loyalty to king, country, and his beloved Alswythe.

Aboriginal American Authors
Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison) Brinton
This bibliographical study illuminates the sophisticated literary traditions of indigenous American peoples, challenging historical misconceptions about the intellectual capacity of native cultures. It serves as a foundational argument for recognizing these works as a vital part of global literature.

Acid Bath
Bill Garson
A solitary outpost worker on an isolated asteroid faces an alien invasion force that mistakes human biology for metal machinery.

Address: Centauri
F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace
Earth rejected them as broken; the stars would have to take them as they were.

Adventures of a Telegraph Boy
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Sixteen-year-old Paul Parton navigates the bustling streets of late nineteenth-century New York as an honest, quick-witted telegraph messenger, gradually unraveling his origins while earning his way toward a brighter future.

All In The Mind
Gene L. Henderson
A disembodied brain in a mountain laboratory fights its traitorous creator for survival and discovers unexpected mental powers.

An Account of the Insects Noxious to Agriculture and Plants in New Zealand: The Scale Insects (Coccididae)
William Miles Maskell
Tiny, sap-sucking parasites threaten to devastate New Zealand's orchards and native forests, prompting an urgently practical, meticulously detailed scientific response.

An Example of Communal Currency: The facts about the Guernsey Market House
Joseph Theodore Harris
Facing severe post-war depression and decaying infrastructure, an isolated island community bypasses traditional banking by printing its own non-interest-bearing paper money to build public works, proving that local civic necessity can successfully rewrite the rules of public finance.

Anything Once
Isabel Ostrander
A bruised young man with a secret name and a girl fleeing her past hit the dusty American road together, learning to trust each other one step at a time.

As a Matter of Course
Annie Payson Call
The pursuit of a calm, purposeful existence often founders not on great tragedies, but on the accumulation of minor, self-imposed irritations that clutter the mind and exhaust the nervous system.

At Whispering Pine Lodge
Lawrence J. Leslie
A group of adventurous boys ventures into the Adirondack wilderness to find a missing youth, only to stumble upon a secret fur farm and a dangerous, hidden conspiracy.

Auriol
William Harrison Ainsworth
A man trades his soul for eternal youth, only to find that immortality is a cage controlled by a sinister tormentor.

Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse
John Oxenham
A quiet companion for the restless spirit, this collection of verse offers humble reflections on faith, duty, and the enduring presence of the divine in the midst of life's inevitable storms.

Bermuda Houses
John S. (John Sanford) Humphreys
Local materials and necessity once shaped an architecture of unpretentious perfection, where soft stone, native cedar, and rainwater collection created a domestic style as natural as the island landscape.

Billy To-morrow Stands the Test
Sarah Pratt Carr
High school politics, a mysterious late-night woods stranding, and a sudden arson plot test a teenage boy’s honor in turn-of-the-century Puget Sound.

Black Beaver, the Trapper
James Campbell Lewis
A life on the trail leaves little room for polished grammar, but it yields stories no indoor writer could ever invent.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 425, March, 1851
Various
A mid-nineteenth-century British periodical captures a nation torn between technological pride and human misery, wrestling with economic collapse, moral responsibility, and the turbulent evolution of its culture.

Blanche: A Story for Girls
Mrs. Molesworth
Refusing to trade highborn dignity for quiet obscurity, a resilient mother and her daughters face exile, poverty, and trade in nineteenth-century England.

Books in general
Squire, John Collings, Sir
A relaxed room full of old volumes becomes a mirror for human nature in all its vanity, humor, and unpredictable charm.

British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854
J. L. (John Lyle) Morison
Self-government, not imperial force, bound mid-nineteenth-century Canada to the British Empire.

Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue and Their Shetland Pony
Laura Lee Hope
Two children seek to recover their stolen pet pony from a band of gypsies. This simple adventure explores the bond between siblings and the courage of small people in an adult world.

By Right of Sword
Arthur W. Marchmont
An Englishman stepping into the shoes of a disgraced Russian officer must fight duels, untangle deadly political intrigue, and risk everything to save the Tsar from assassination.

Confessions of an anarchist
W. C. Hart
A former insider pulls back the curtain on London’s radical underworld to expose the hypocrisy, factionalism, and absurdities of early twentieth-century Anarchism.

Considerations on the Negroe cause commonly so called: Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield, lord chief justice of the Court of King's Bench, &c
Samuel Estwick
A legal defense of the slave trade from 1772, this work argues that British statutes explicitly defined enslaved people as commercial property, rather than as human subjects protected by law.

Cricket
Elizabeth Weston Timlow
A headstrong girl rushes through a season of reckless scrapes, slowly learning that her bounding spirit needs the anchor of a thoughtful heart.

Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5: Emerson
John Morley
This critical portrait strips away the mythic layers surrounding an American icon to reveal a thinker whose most enduring strength was his unwavering commitment to individual sincerity. It offers a balanced, rigorous assessment of a man who transformed his own life into a laboratory for the soul.

Cutting and draping
John W. (John Wesley) Stephenson
A clear tape measure and a bolt of heavy fabric are all it takes to transform a bare room into an imposing interior, provided one knows how to calculate a scallop and cut a clean edge.

Deck and port
Walter Colton
A navy chaplain turns a three-year Pacific cruise into an astute travelogue, recording the weather, crew life, foreign ports, and the dramatic dawn of American California.

Descriptive Zoopraxography
Eadweard Muybridge
A pioneering photograhic trial captures the true, hidden mechanics of movement, shattering centuries of artistic tradition by revealing how bodies actually propel themselves through space.

Diamonds
William Crookes
A world-renowned chemist takes readers into the depths of South Africa’s volcanic pipes and high-pressure laboratories to unlock the subterranean origins, physical paradoxes, and industrial extraction of the world’s most prized gemstone.