19th Century Titles

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3374-0
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December Tales: a selection by William Harrison Ainsworth

William Harrison Ainsworth published his December Tales when he was eighteen. Though he later became famous as a prolific historical novelist, author of such popular fictions as Rookwood (1834), Jack Sheppard (1839), and The Lancashire Witches (1849), and sometimes rivalled Dickens in popularity, his use in these early works of romance, adventure, and the supernatural became an influence on Edgar Allan Poe.

Edited by Ryan Twomey, with Jennifer Simkins

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-4048-9
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Tristram Jones by Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse's "Tristram Jones", written on the brink of adulthood and previously unpublished, is an intriguing forerunner of his classic memoir, Father and Son, of 1907. Based on Gosse's experiences of starting a new life in London after a cloistered religious upbringing, and including striking parallels with the memoir of more than three decades later, this witty novella chronicles a young man's ambitions, illusions, and blunders.

Edited by Kathy Rees and Christine Alexander

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3979-7
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Selected Early Poems by Felicia Hemans

Thirteen-year-old Felicia Browne is acutely conscious of her "youthful vows to Poesy" and "the future path I tread". In her first publication Poems (1808), she grandly thanks her patroness who "with laurel crown'd my infant head" and "fann'd my rising flame". The precocious poet was to become the popular Felicia Hemans, and outsell both Wordsworth and Coleridge. This volume presents a selection from the first of three youthful volumes of lively poems–engaging family, nature, and war–that she managed to publish while still a teenager.

Edited by Christine Alexander and Pamela Nutt, with others

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3715-1
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The Diary Papers of Emily and Anne Brontë

The Diary Papers provide a rare insight into the early creativity, everyday affairs and anxieties about the future of two of the famous Brontë sisters. Written in minuscule script over a span of eleven years and illustrated by lively sketches, the fragments record details of Emily and Anne’s imaginative Gondal world amongst references to sewing, cooking, pets, servants, family travels, and future plans that reveal their personal differences despite their intimacy.

Edited by Christine Alexander, with Mandy Swann

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3831-8
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Mollie's Bunyip and Other Tales by Annie and Ida Rentoul

The early twentieth-century Australian teenagers, Annie and Ida Rentoul, collaborated as writer and illustrator on a series of tales. They chose to work in the fairy-tale genre at a time when there was a demand for such stories to have an Australian character. Ida's career as writer, and particularly as illustrator, grew from these childhood publications, eventually leading to international acclaim.

Edited by Pamela Nutt, with others.

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3753-3
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The Journals and Poems of Marjory Fleming

A self-confessed "little young Devil" who could throw spectacular temper tantrums, Marjory Fleming was nevertheless sanctified as "Pet" by the Victorians for her brief life and winning writings. In her engaging verse and journals she shares her wide reading, her delight in "rurel filisity" and her devotion to Mary Queen of Scots and Scottish history.

Edited by Leslie Robertson and Juliet McMaster, with others.

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3806-6
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Branwell Brontë's The Pirate

Written at the age of fifteen, The Pirate transports us into the dramatic imaginary world of the young Brontë's, tracing the early career of Branwell's favourite hero (and later alter-ego) 'Rouge' to aristocratic demagogue. The young author and his hero both played pivotal roles in the creation of the Glass Town and Angrian saga.

Edited by Christine Alexander, with Joetta Harty and Benjamin Drexler.

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3677-2
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Louisa May Alcott's Norna, or The Witch's Curse

This is the real play, written when Alcott was fifteen, of which she provides a farcical description in Little Women. Full of fierce posturing and melodramatic action, Norna shows young Louisa and her collaborating sister Anna stretching their creative wings in poetic drama.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and Others

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3575-0
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Elizabeth Thompson (Butler), Waterloo Diary: Woman Battle Artist in Training

Inspired by a visit to the field of Waterloo, "that inexhaustible battle", and determined to become a painter of battle scenes, young Elizabeth Thompson (later Butler) records her training and the prejudices she faced as a woman painter: until she scores a huge success at the Royal Academy with what Ruskin called "the first fine Pre-Raphaelite picture of battle".

Edited by Juliet McMaster and Others.

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3576-9
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Ethel Turner's That Young Rebel

Ethel Turner's "That Young Rebel" is the serial written for the final year of the Parthenon, the journal she wrote with her sister, Lilian, from 1889 to 1892. Her rebel exemplifies those qualities of resilience and a healthy disregard for authority that Turner - later author of the famous children's novel Seven Little Australians (1894) - clearly admires and finds appropriate as Australia itself moves towards independent nationhood.

Edited by Pamela Nutt, with Others

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3374-0
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Ethel Turner's Tales from the Parthenon

Ethel Turner, author of the Australian children's classic Seven Little Australians , founded the Parthenon, a journal for young people, with her sister Lilian in 1889. Her contributions to this successful publication shaped her writing career as an editor of children's columns and as an award-winning children's writer who is also one of Australia's best-loved authors.

Edited by Pamela Nutt, with others Illustrations by Naomi Harris

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3321-4
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Robert Louis Stevenson's First Writings

At the age of six, R.L.S. styled himself as "The Author" of a "History". Here we see him demonstrating the creativity of "Child's Play" in texts as various as biblical history, naval adventure, travel writing and antiquarian records, some of which are published for the first time.

Edited by Christine Alexander, with Elise McPherson

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2994-1
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Charles Dickens's The Bill of Fare, O'Thello & Other Early Works

"All these things have worked together to make me what I am", Dickens wrote of his childhood. Among "these things" in his juvenilia are his genius for story telling, his creation of comic characters and his love of the theatre. Like David Copperfield, they throw light on a young man in love, bursting with inventiveness and struggling to shape his ideas into the kind of public performance that would lead to fame. This is the early road that would lead to "The Inimitable".

Edited by Christine Alexander, with Donna Couto and Kate Sumner

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3128-9
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Leigh Hunts The Palace of Pleasure & Other Early Poems

Young Leigh Hunt's poems, early recognized as “ proofs of poetic genius”, offer landscapes populated by happy schoolboys and errant knights freed from magical enthrallment. Already vivid here is Hunt"s lifelong commitment to the betterment of his fellow man through friendship and communion with nature.

Edited by Sylvia Hunt, with others
Illustrations by Karl Denny

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-3131-9
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John Ruskin's From Seven to Seventeen: Poems

The greatness of great creators, John Ruskin wrote, stems from "what they had seen and felt from early childhood". The early poems of this great critic, artist, and social commentator demonstrate this insight in fascinating ways.

Edited by Rob Breton, with Alayna Becker and Katrina Schurter

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2941-5
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Mary Grant Bruce: The Early Tales

Mary Grant Bruce’s nineteenth-century childhood was spent in rural Victoria and throughout her writing career this landscape provided the setting for many of her stories. These early tales, written for the newspaper The Leader, demonstrate an understanding of the challenges of the Australian outback and introduce many of the concerns she would later develop in her highly successful fiction for children.

Edited by Pamela Nutt with students from Presbyterian Ladies' College Sydney; illustrations by Matilda Fay and Isabelle Ng

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2937-8
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Iris Vaughan’s The Diary of Iris Vaughan
(New Revised Edition)

Iris Vaughan's Diary, begun when Vaughan was only seven, is as much autobiography as Diary. It also gives a charming, keenly observed and brilliantly amusing picture of colonial Africa as Victorianism made way for the twentieth century.

Edited by Peter F. Alexander and Peter Midgley, with Sigi Howes;  illustrations by J. H. Jackson

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2899
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Patrick Branwell Brontë’s The History of the Young Men

In a tale of exploration, bloody battles, colonization and supernatural 'guardian demons', the thirteen-year- old Branwell chronicles the founding of imaginary African kingdoms and the exploits of the toy soldiers who inspired the Glass Town and Angrian saga. Here we observe the role of history and the power of childhood play in the early writing of the neglected but talented brother of the famous Bront� sisters.

Edited by William Baker, with others

• ISBN: 978 0 7334 2728-2
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George Eliot’s Edward Neville
(New edition)

This fragment of a historical novel, set in the time of the English Civil War, is the first fiction we have from the hand of the girl who was to become the great novelist George Eliot. With Sir Walter Scott as her model, she presents a dauntless young soldier as hero, and as his antagonist the historical regicide, Henry Marten, long imprisoned in Chepstow Castle.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others (with illustrations by Juliet McMaster)

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2756-5
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Dick Doyle’s Journal, Volume III

by Richard Doyle with illustrations by the author

This third and last volume of Dick Doyle’s Journal follows the young artist’s lively participation in the literary, musical, and artistic culture of London in 1840, and his frenetic preparation of this journal as a Christmas gift for his father.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2681-0
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Lewis Carroll's The Rectory Magazine

by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) with illustrations by the author

The Rectory Magazine, produced by the thirteen-year-old Lewis Carroll with contributions from other members of the Croft Rectory, displays the young professional at work—as poet, short-story writer, journalist, artist and editor. The confident self-mocking style, comic verse, word puzzles, nonsense games and parody we associate with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are clearly exhibited in this delightfully whimsical early family magazine.

Edited by Valerie Sanders and Elizabeth O’Reilly

• ISBN: 0-7334-2387-6
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Dick Doyle's Journal

by Richard Doyle with illustrations by the author

In this portrait of the artist as a boy, Richard Doyle, soon to be a noted Punch artist and illustrator of Dickens, Thackeray, and Ruskin, records his first professional foray. His journal comes in words and lively pictures, recording his full engagement in the teeming cultural life of the London of 1840.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others

• ISBN: 978-0-7334-2615-5
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Dick Doyle's Journal Volume 2

by Richard Doyle with illustrations by the author

In this second volume of the diary of Richard Doyle, who was soon to become the much-loved Punch graphic artist, we follow the talented fifteen-year-old in his energetic pursuit of art, music, and military reviews, through the vivid summer days of the London of 1840.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

• ISBN: 0-9698271-1-3
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Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine

The Glass Town Magazine written by Branwell Brontë with contributions from his sister Charlotte Brontë

Branwell Brontë is generally known as the misfit brother of three famous literary sisters. Yet he was probably the first to document the young Brontës’ imaginary childhood saga, and he preceded his sisters into print, publishing nineteen poems in local newspapers—at least fourteen of them before Charlotte’s …

Edited by Christine Alexander and assisted by Vanessa Benson
and illustrations by Rebecca Alexander

• ISBN: 0-9681961-7-9
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Charlotte Brontë's Albion and Marina

A romance about star-crossed lovers, Albion and Marina is a trial run by 14-year-old Charlotte Bronte for Jane Eyre. The story comes from early in the Glass Town sagas, and it launches her Byronic hero Arthur Wellesley on his notable poetic and erotic careers.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

• ISBN: 0-9681961-0-1
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Charlotte Brontë's My Angria and the Angrians

Dashing Dukes, lovelorn ladies, and political intrigues, and mayhem among Brontë siblings, provides an introduction into the rich childhood world of the Brontës. This edition includes maps, a family tree, abundant literary and historical information, and lively illustrations.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and Leslie Robertson with others.

• ISBN: 0-9688283-5-3
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Charlotte Brontë's Tales of the Islanders

Volume 1 of Tales of the Islanders shows the light-hearted freedom of a child author unrestrained by social expectations or the literary conventions of the "adult" world of authorship and publication. Nurtured within a collaborative environment, this writing is an early thread of the childhood web of characters, countries and adventures that Charlotte Brontë wove, together with her brother and sisters.

Edited by Christine Alexander and others.

• ISBN: 0-7334-1980-1
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Charlotte Brontë's Tales of the Islanders Volume 2

Volume 2 of Tales of the Islanders continues the form of Charlotte Brontë's first volume: a narrative involving both political allegory and fairytale. Here we find, side by side, real and imaginary events creatively linked in writing that is both exuberantly playful and self-consciously literate.

Edited by Christine Alexander and others.

• ISBN: 0733420559
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Charlotte Brontë's Tales of the Islanders Volume 3

Volume 3 of Tales of the Islanders shows the rich allusive quality of Charlotte Brontë's writing, as she weaves realistic references to corporal punishment, varieties of suicide, Japan china and Persian carpets (and much more!) into her imaginative adventures of the Duke of Wellington and his sons. In this volume we also see the young author experimenting with her role as narrator, occasionally tripping herself up as her imagination runs away with her, but always conscious of an audience and the literary conventions of book-making that she is keen to emulate.

Edited by Christine Alexander and others.

• ISBN: 0-7334-2181-4
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Charlotte Brontë's Tales of the Islanders Volume 4

In volume 4 of Tales of the Islanders the Brontës, disguised as three old washerwomen, confront the Duke of Wellington. Domesticity and the real world are left behind in favour of fantasy and otherworldly tales.

Edited by Christine Alexander and others.

• ISBN: 0-9698271-4-8
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George Eliot's Edward Neville

A swashbuckling narrative set in Chepstow Castle during the English Civil War. This fragment of a historical novel, with its equestrian hero confronting a time of civil and religious upheaval, and its dark villain proudly brooding in his castle prison, has its lasting appeal as the first fiction we have from the hand of the great novelist we know as George Eliot.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

• ISBN: 0-7334-2115-5
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Iris Vaughan's The Diary of Iris Vaughan

Iris Vaughan's Diary, begun when Vaughan was only seven, is as much autobiography as Diary. It also gives a charming, keenly observed and brilliantly amusing picture of colonial Africa as Victorianism made way for the twentieth century.

Edited by Peter F. Alexander and Peter Midgley.