In Volume Two we have much the same personnel as in Volume One; the vicar and his sister Miss Pimpernell; Lady Dasher and her two daughters; Miss Spight and Mawley the curate; Min and Mrs. Clyde; Catch the dog. Having set the scene in Volume One, Hutcheson goes on to weave a beautiful story round the love-affair between the hero, Lorton, and Min, she with the admirable grey eyes. We will not tell you how it fared--you must find that out for yourself.
While I think the story was well-written, and it makes a very good audiobook to listen to, Hutcheson is still up to his tricks. Just to prove how brainy he is, he quotes extensively from French, German, Italian, Latin, and even in one place, Greek. In these days when our educations have been so dummed down, I find this unhelpful. To read a quotation from a good English poet is a joy and a pleasure, so why go elsewhere for a poetic quotation, except it be to show off.
As in Volume One, Hutcheson sometimes invents words never seen elsewhere, but for which there is a good word in current use, but spelt slightly differently. And his punctuation is weird, too. I particularly dislike the dashes in his speech paragraphs, something like the following:
"Hello,"--said the vicar;--"what a nice day it is."
I have left these in, though I've corrected the novel spelling whenever possible.
It has been very hard to find anything about the life of John Conroy Hutcheson. He was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1840, and died in Portsea, England, in late 1896 or early 1897. This was picked up from the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He wrote about 18 novels, most, though not all, about the sea.
A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.
These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.
We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.
To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.
The resulting text can be read either on the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk
