The Crush
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Kate Douglas Wiggin was an important reformer of children's education at the turn of the century. During a period when children's use in society was often little more than for cheap labor, Kate Douglas Wiggin was dedicated to the betterment of youth. She was the first person to found a free kindergarten school in San Francisco in 1878. Her passion for children's rights carried over to her successful career as an author of children's books. In her...
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Idylls of the King (1859-1885) is a cycle of narrative poems by British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Written while Tennyson was serving as Poet Laureate, Idylls of the King reworks the medieval Arthurian legend in blank verse and with an elegiac tone. Based on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and the early British Mabinogion manuscripts, Tennyson's work connects an ancient tradition to the reign and ideals of Queen Victoria.
"The Coming of Arthur"...
3) The Watsons
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Jane Austen's unfinished novel‚ The Watsons tells the story of a widowed clergyman and his two sons and four daughters. The youngest daughter, Emma, returns home after being raised by a wealthy aunt. Better-educated and more genteel than her other sisters, she looks on disapprovingly at the husband-hunting of two of her sisters, and relates better to her more responsible oldest sister, Elizabeth. Various would-be suitors appear, including the boorish...
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This is a gentle Christmas story, whose message is that if we didn't already have Christmas, we'd find a way to invent it. It's hard times in Old Trail Town as the Season of Giving approaches. The factory that employs most of the town is closed and not likely to re-open, and town merchants fear that people will try to shop on credit. Unwilling to carry the debt, the merchants work out a scheme to get everybody in town to agree not to have Christmas...
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Washington Irving's Old Christmas tells of an American's travels through England during the Christmas season. Through a chance meeting with an old friend, he is able to experience Christmas in a stately manor house. Through his eyes as a houseguest, he glimpses the uniquely British customs and celebrations of Christmas as it would have been experienced during the Middle Ages, rather than in the early 19th century.
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Twenty stories were originally published in the Christmas editions of the magazines "Household Words" and "All The Year Round". Some of the stories have little holiday sentiment and exhibit much of the indignation Dickens felt at the social and economic injustices of his day. Some of the stories were written in collaboration with other authors. The editor of this volume chose to omit those other chapters and include only Dickens' work. The result...
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Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of...
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This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England.
A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson—who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist—Lucy is soon at war with the...
9) Hamlet
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In this quintessential Shakespeare tragedy, a young prince's halting pursuit of revenge for the murder of his father unfolds in a series of highly charged confrontations that have held audiences spellbound for nearly four centuries. Those fateful exchanges, and the anguished soliloquies that precede and follow them, probe depths of human feeling rarely sounded in any art.
The title role of Hamlet, perhaps the most demanding in all of Western drama,...
10) Olalla
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"Olalla" is a short story by the Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the Christmas 1885 issue of The Court and Society Review, then re-published in 1887 as part of the collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. It is set in Spain during the Peninsular War.
The story is based on a dream that Stevenson had and in his 1888 essay "A Chapter on Dreams" he describes the difficulties...
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Tuktu and her brother, Aklak, are Eskimo children who live happily with their beloved reindeer in the Northland. When Tuktu is lost in a fog, she meets Santa Claus or the Good Spirit as she knows him. This generous little girl wants to share her reindeer with the children of the world and so works to help Santa on his annual Christmas journey.