The first bicycle was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the 1890s that the craze really took off. This brought with it the fears, scaremongering, worries and uncertainties that inevitably accompany any new fashion. Women (often unchaperoned and oddly dressed) taking to "velocipedes"; overexertion; the possibility of heart disease - these are just some of the fears that haunted the establishment in the late nineteenth century... But with it, of course,...

A classic Agatha Christie short story from the collection The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories.Every morning at the same hour on the golf course, Jack Hartington hears mysterious cries for help coming from a cottage. He speaks to the resident and learns that she has unsettling dreams of a woman with a blue Chinese vase. Believing that the cries for help are from the late Mrs. Turner, the former resident of the cottage, Jack hires a psychic inv...

The Yellow Wallpaper is a story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health. Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman (Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has...

In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets—when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta—there lived a tailor in Gloucester.He sat in the window of a little shop in Westgate Street, cross-legged on a table, from morning till dark.All day long while the light lasted he sewed and snippeted, piecing out his satin and pompadour, and lutestring; stuffs had strange names, and were very expensive in the days of the Tailor of Gl...

Unlock Aldous Huxley’s timeless classic for a new generation of students.This comprehensive teacher’s guide to Brave New World offers a complete framework to connect this cornerstone of dystopian fiction with the modern classroom.Designed specifically for grades 9-10, this guide provides everything an educator needs to teach the novel effectively. This resource delivers a full unit of standards-based instruction, from pre-reading activities to final assessm...

In this 7,400 word story, Holmes and Watson investigate the disappearance of a jewel from the library of the Mayor of Portsmouth.A 'locked room' mystery.

On the 9th of June 1865, Charles Dickens was travelling aboard the Folkestone to London Boat Train with his mistress and her mother, when it derailed while crossing a viaduct near Staplehurst in Kent. The train plunged down a bank into a dry river bed, killing ten passengers, and badly wounding forty.Dickens was profoundly affected by the disaster, and a year later, he published The Signalman, a supremely atmospheric ghost story in which the narrator, while investigating a...

More than 1,000,000 copies sold!Don'ts for Husbands is a facsimile of the original 1913 edition, containing hundreds of snippets of entertaining advice for a happy marriage. While some are quirkily of their time, and rich with fascinating insights into the history of relations between the sexes, many contain wisdom that rings true more than 100 years after they were written.Inside you can find advice on topics such as habits, jealousy, household ma...

Working at the end of the nineteenth century, photographer Henry Peach Robinson was best known for his zealous, and highly adept, use of combination printing -- creating a single image from multiple negatives. He was also an accomplished writer and this short book from 1888 remains one of his most endearing. In practical instruction and personal anecdote, it extols his unyielding belief that capturing the natural beauty of the landscape required the helping hand of props, costumed models, and...

As people stroll through Kew Gardens, their conversations and thoughts interweave with the life of the garden itself. A rich tapestry of inner lives and nature unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness style.

...the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man.The fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is a distillation of Italo Svevo's concerns--attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, and the cost of sexual desire. This novella is a marvel of psychological insight, following the man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications to their tragic-comic end. It is presente...

On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay by Mark Twain from 1885. In it he deplores that way man's "most faithful friend" is being used and indeed misused, declaring that "the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and ...