A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Theme
Virtue Ethics
212 works in the library take up virtue ethics, from Theogony and Works and Days to Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
Works
A Letter Concerning Toleration is John Locke's argument that the civil government and the church are two distinct societies with different ends, and that the magistrate has no authority to compel belief or worship. Locke wrote it in Latin, as Epistola de Tolerantia, during the winter of 1685–86 while living in exile in the Dutch Republic, addressing it to his friend the Remonstrant theologian Philipp van Limborch.
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
A Theory of Justice is the major work of the American philosopher John Rawls, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 1971 after nearly two decades of articles on the same themes. Rawls sets out to offer an alternative to utilitarianism, the view that the right policy is whatever produces the greatest total happiness, which he thought had dominated modern moral and political philosophy.
Hume subtitled his first book 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects', and he meant it literally: as Newton had explained the heavens by a few observed principles, Hume would explain belief, emotion and morality by a few principles of the mind. Book I, Of the Understanding, begins by dividing all perceptions into vivid impressions and fainter ideas, and holds that every simple idea is copied from a prior impression.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in about six weeks in the autumn of 1791, and Joseph Johnson published it in London early in 1792. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book of Greek myths retold for children. Six stories are set inside a frame: Eustace Bright, an eighteen-year-old Williams College student on vacation, tells them to a crowd of children staying at Tanglewood, a country house in the Berkshires, whom Hawthorne gives flower and plant names such as Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Squash-Blossom and Buttercup.
Aesop's Fables are short animal tales that turn ordinary encounters—a wolf and a lamb, a lion and a mouse, ants and a grasshopper—into clear morals about justice, prudence, gratitude, and folly. The Greek slave Aesop is the traditional name attached to a body of stories that circulated orally and in later collections; what survives for English readers is a tradition of brief narratives ending in a pointed lesson.
Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel about a real man who was born in Africa around 1710, enslaved in Massachusetts, and died free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Its ten chapters carry dates.
Claude Bernard published this book in Paris in 1865 as the opening of a larger treatise on experimental medicine that he never completed. It sets out, for physicians, the method by which he had made his own discoveries, and argues that medicine must become a science grounded in physiology and the laboratory.
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England was published in London in November 1644, deliberately without a licence, a printer's name or registration with the Stationers' Company. It is written as an oration addressed to the Lords and Commons, though it was never delivered.
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in George Makepeace Towle’s public-domain English translation, follows Phileas Fogg’s Reform Club wager to circle the globe in eighty days with his servant Passepartout, while detective Fix shadows him as a bank-robbery suspect. Steamships, railways, elephants, and storms turn geography into a race; calm precision meets loyal improvisation.
Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack present the founding era through self-fashioning, practical wisdom, and the culture of improvement. The Autobiography narrates Franklin's movement from Boston apprentice to Philadelphia printer, civic organizer, scientist, and public man.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Horse', is narrated by a handsome black horse with a white star and one white foot. He grows up in a pleasant meadow under a kind master, Farmer Grey, and his mother Duchess teaches him to be gentle and good and to work willingly.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is a full-length popular biography of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), written for a general Christian readership. It begins with the large, cultured Bonhoeffer family of Breslau and Berlin: his father Karl, a leading professor of psychiatry and neurology; his devout mother Paula, who schooled her children at home in their early years; his twin sister Sabine; and the death of his brother Walter in the First World War, which marked the family deeply.
Botchan is a comic first-person novel about a hot-tempered, stubbornly honest young man from Tokyo who spends a few months teaching mathematics in a provincial middle school and cannot bear the scheming he finds there. The narrator is never named; the old family servant Kiyo calls him Botchan, roughly 'young master', which this translation renders as Master Darling.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
Characters is a collection of brief sketches of recognizable social types: the dissembler, flatterer, chatterer, boor, complaisant man, reckless man, tactless man, mean man, show-off, coward, oligarchic sympathizer, late learner, slanderer and many others. Each sketch begins with a definition and then offers small scenes in which the type reveals himself through repeated behavior.
Vincent Chiarella worked as a markup man in the New York composing room of Pandick Press, a financial printer. In 1975 and 1976 he handled five announcements of corporate takeover bids.
Christ Legends is a book of eleven stories in which the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf retells and invents legends about the life of Jesus, from the night of His birth to the Crucifixion and after. Some come from old Christian tradition, some from folk tales, and some are her own; all are told in a simple, warm voice suited to reading aloud.
On 23 April 1910 Theodore Roosevelt, a year out of the presidency and fresh from a long hunting expedition in East Africa, addressed a packed hall at the Sorbonne in Paris. He spoke as the citizen of one great republic to the citizens of another, and his subject was the character that self-government demands of ordinary people.
Considerations on Representative Government, published in London in 1861, is John Stuart Mill's full treatment of how a free people should be governed. Written in the years of debate over a second Reform Act, it gathers ideas Mill had developed in Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859) and in his reading of Thomas Hare's scheme of proportional representation.
Cranford is a small English country town, twenty miles by railway from the busy commercial city of Drumble, where nearly every householder of the better sort is a single lady or a widow. The narrator, Mary Smith, a young woman from Drumble, visits often and describes their code: calls of exactly fifteen minutes, card parties with wafer bread-and-butter, and an 'elegant economy' that treats spending as vulgar and never names poverty.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, published at Riga in 1788, is the second of his three Critiques. Where the first Critique limited what reason can know about God, freedom and the soul, this book argues that pure reason is practical by itself: it can determine the will without any help from desire, and in doing so it gives freedom, God and immortality a secure footing as matters of rational belief.
On the night of 11 January 1983 Nancy Beth Cruzan, a young Missouri woman, lost control of her car on a county road in Jasper County. Paramedics restored her breathing and heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness, and the trial court later found her to be in a persistent vegetative state, kept alive by a surgically implanted feeding tube in a state hospital.
De Anima asks what soul is by beginning with the observable powers of living things. Aristotle reviews earlier accounts from thinkers such as Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Plato, then rejects explanations that make soul either a wandering body, a harmony, or a separate passenger inside the organism.
De Regno is Aquinas's unfinished treatise on kingship, addressed to the king of Cyprus and concerned with why political rule exists, how it can serve the common good, and how it can decay into tyranny. Aquinas begins from the social nature of human beings.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, argues that the human person has a right not to be coerced by individuals, groups, or the state in religious matters. The document grounds that right in dignity, conscience, and the nature of truth, while insisting that the right concerns immunity from coercion rather than indifference about religious truth.
In March 1973 Raymond Dirks, an officer of a New York broker-dealer who analyzed insurance company securities for institutional investors, received a call from Ronald Secrist, a former officer of Equity Funding Corporation of America. Secrist said that the company's assets were vastly overstated through fraud, that regulators had ignored similar warnings, and that Dirks should verify the charges and make them public.
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a short essay asking one question with unusual persistence: how can so many men, cities and nations put up with a single tyrant, who has no power except what they give him? La Boétie, writing as a young law student around 1548 (some scholars date it to about 1552-53), addresses the question to a friend named Longa and answers it in stages.
The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more.
The Enneads collect Plotinus's treatises as arranged by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine. They do not form a continuous textbook, but they return again and again to a metaphysical pattern: all reality proceeds from the One, through Intellect, to Soul, and the philosophical life is a movement of return toward unity.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Essays: First Series gathers twelve essays that Emerson worked up from his journals and from the lecture courses he gave in Boston in the late 1830s. Each pursues one idea through a rush of aphorisms, examples and images rather than a step-by-step argument, and together they set out his conviction that the same universal mind or soul speaks in every person and in nature.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Experience and Education is a short book of eight chapters in which John Dewey, then nearly eighty, restates his philosophy of education and answers both its opponents and some of its followers. By the 1930s progressive education, often associated with Dewey's name, had become a broad movement in American schools, and critics charged it with neglecting knowledge, discipline and the inherited wisdom of the past.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
Farmer Boy tells about a year and more in the boyhood of Almanzo Wilder, the author's future husband, on his family's prosperous farm near Malone in northern New York in the 1860s. Almanzo is almost nine when the book opens in January, walking to the schoolhouse with his brother Royal and his sisters Eliza Jane and Alice.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
Fides et Ratio is John Paul II's 1998 encyclical on the relation between faith and reason. Its governing image is that the human spirit rises toward contemplation of truth by two wings, and the whole argument defends the compatibility and mutual need of revelation and philosophical inquiry.
Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on Saturday, 4 March 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. About a quarter of the work force was unemployed, farm prices had collapsed, and in the weeks before the ceremony a wave of bank runs had led governors in most states to close or restrict their banks.
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, with their baby brother the Lamb, have come from two years in Camden Town to a white house in the Kent countryside near Rochester, between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit. Their father is called away on business and their mother goes to nurse their sick grandmother, leaving them in the care of the nursemaid Martha and the other servants.
Freedom and the Law is a short book of legal and political philosophy by the Italian jurist Bruno Leoni, based on lectures he gave at Claremont Men's College in California in 1958 at a summer institute on freedom and competitive enterprise. It was published in English in 1961 by D. Van Nostrand in the William Volker Fund series in the humane studies.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else.
Heidi, in Elisabeth P. Stork’s public-domain English translation, tells of a small orphan brought to live with her reclusive Alm-Uncle high in the Swiss Alps, then carried away to Frankfurt’s closed rooms before homesickness and providence return her to mountain air, goats, and fir trees. Johanna Spyri’s novel joins outdoor joy to serious care for the sick, the lonely, and the hard-hearted.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
Household Stories is Lucy Crane's English translation of fifty-two tales chosen from the Brothers Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in London by Macmillan in 1882 with pictures by her brother Walter Crane; the library text follows a later reprint and omits the illustrations. The selection mixes the most famous wonder tales with comic stories, animal fables and short nursery pieces.
If— is a father's counsel to his son on what it takes to become a man, delivered as one long conditional sentence. Kipling printed it in Rewards and Fairies (1910), a book of linked stories for children in which poems sit between the tales; If— follows the story Brother Square-Toes.
Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's ordered account of Christian doctrine, written to train readers in godliness and to show the King of France what his persecuted evangelical subjects actually believed. The library text opens with the Prefatory Address to Francis I, which pleads that the Reformers teach nothing new but the faith of Scripture and the early fathers, and with Calvin's Epistle to the Reader, dated Geneva, 1 August 1559, in which he says he was never satisfied until the work was set in its present order.
Jane Eyre is the life story, told by Jane herself, of an orphan girl who grows into a governess and finally a wife, keeping her conscience and her self-respect through poverty, temptation and grief. At ten Jane lives at Gateshead Hall with her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Reed, who resents her, and her bullying cousin John.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of twelve public letters that John Dickinson printed in the Pennsylvania Chronicle beginning with the issue of November 30–December 3, 1767, and continuing weekly into February 1768. Writing as a modest farmer settled near the Delaware River, a man of small estate, a good library and a contented mind, Dickinson addressed his countrymen in the British colonies about the measures Parliament had passed in 1767 under Charles Townshend.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West. The narrative begins with Martin's birth in Pannonia, upbringing in Italy, and reluctant military service.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
Leibniz's logical writings on binary arithmetic and universal character are scattered across essays, letters, drafts, and memoranda rather than gathered in a single finished book. Their unity lies in a dream: reasoning might be made clearer, more reliable, and more inventive by a symbolic language whose elements combine according to rules.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
The Meno opens without any scene-setting. Meno, a rich young Thessalian from Pharsalus who has studied with the orator Gorgias, asks Socrates whether virtue comes by teaching, by practice, by nature, or in some other way.
Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis's case for, and plain explanation of, the beliefs held in common by Christians of most denominations. In the preface Lewis borrows the phrase "mere Christianity" from the Puritan writer Richard Baxter and compares the shared faith to a hall from which doors open into the rooms of the separate churches; he says he is describing the hall, not recommending a room, and that people must eventually live in a room rather than in the hall.
No Treason is a series of pamphlets that Lysander Spooner, a Boston lawyer and long-time abolitionist, published at his own expense after the Civil War. He planned a longer series but issued only three numbers, No. I and No. II in 1867 and No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, in 1870; Nos.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is Richard Hooker's defence of the order of the Church of England as settled under Elizabeth I, written against the Puritan party that wished to replace government by bishops with the presbyterian discipline practised at Geneva. The library text contains the Preface and Book I, the opening portion of a work in eight books; the Everyman printing it comes from also includes editorial footnotes, a few of which remain in this OCR text, while that printing's modern introduction is omitted.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
On Duties is Cicero's last philosophical work, written in the autumn of 44 BC, in the months after the murder of Julius Caesar, and addressed as a letter in three books to his son Marcus, then studying philosophy at Athens under the Peripatetic Cratippus. Cicero follows, with freedom, the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes, whose treatise on duty (kathēkon, Latin officium) he adapts for a Roman reader, adding examples from Roman history and from his own career.
On Free Will, published in Latin at Basel in September 1524 as De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (a discourse or comparison of passages concerning free will), is Erasmus's public answer to Martin Luther on the question of whether the human will has any part in salvation. Erasmus had long hesitated to write against Luther, whose criticism of abuses he partly shared, but by 1524 he was pressed by friends, princes and churchmen to declare himself, and he chose the one doctrine on which he thought Luther had gone furthest: Luther's statement of 1520 that free will after the Fall is a name without a reality.
This small volume presents Montaigne's celebrated essay on friendship together with other essays from the Essais in M. A. Screech's translation. The title essay, 'Of Friendship' (Book I, Chapter 28 in modern numbering), was written as a memorial to Étienne de La Boétie, the young magistrate and humanist whom Montaigne met in Bordeaux around 1558 and who died in 1563.
Milton's sonnet on his blindness is a fourteen-line argument between a complaining heart and a corrective voice. It was written in the early 1650s, after Milton, then in his forties and serving the Commonwealth government, had lost his sight entirely.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most sustained inquiry into the historical and psychological origins of moral values. In three treatises he asks where good and evil came from, how guilt and bad conscience developed, and what ascetic ideals do for priests, philosophers, artists, scientists, and sufferers.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals is the short Latin treatise, printed at Frankfurt in 1628, in which William Harvey argued that the blood moves continuously in a circuit, driven out by the heart through the arteries and returned to it by the veins. The library text is Robert Willis's English translation of 1847, as revised by Alexander Bowie and reprinted in 1910 in the Harvard Classics, with that series' introductory note on Harvey's life.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his.
Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden) is a short philosophical essay by Immanuel Kant, published at Königsberg in 1795, a few months after Prussia made a separate peace with revolutionary France at Basel. Kant cast it, with a touch of irony, in the form of a peace treaty.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) was written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures on law, ethics and the state. Its preface is dated June 1820, and the book appeared in Berlin late that year with 1821 on the title page.
Politics examines the polis as the community ordered toward living well. Aristotle begins with the household, including relations of master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child, and then argues that the city exists by nature because human beings possess speech about justice and advantage.
Politics and the English Language is an essay of about five thousand words by George Orwell, first published in the London literary monthly Horizon in April 1946, in the months after the Second World War when he was beginning Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that careless English and dishonest politics feed each other, and that the process can be reversed by writers who take trouble over their words.
Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly.
The Regensburg Lecture, delivered by Benedict XVI in 2006 at the University of Regensburg, argues that Christian faith is intrinsically bound to reason and that the modern narrowing of reason endangers both theology and culture. Benedict begins with a contested quotation from a dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian interlocutor, then uses the controversy over faith and violence to introduce his larger claim: acting against reason is contrary to the nature of God.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a historical study, first given as the Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures in 1922, of how Christian thought about economic life changed between the late Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century. Tawney's question is how a society that once judged trade, lending and prices by moral and religious standards came to treat economic activity as a self-governing realm ruled by impersonal laws.
Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 and addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world, takes its Latin title from its opening words about the spirit of revolutionary change. Its English title is On the Condition of the Working Classes.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows a restless young Englishman who ignores his father’s counsel, goes to sea, and after storms and slavery is cast alone on an island where industry, improvisation, and providence remake his life. The novel invented a lasting modern myth of solitude: journal-keeping, goat pens, canoe failures, fear of footprints, and the arrival of Friday.
Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc., and its principal, Harry P. Schwarzmann, published a monthly investment newsletter, the Capital Gains Report, mailed to about five thousand subscribers at eighteen dollars a year. Between March and November 1960, on six occasions, the firm bought shares of a stock shortly before recommending it in the Report for long-term investment.
Calvin's Selected Sermons present the Reformation as disciplined exposition rather than only protest. Preaching in Geneva, Calvin moved sequentially through biblical books, applying Scripture to doctrine, worship, civic life, household conduct, suffering, and church reform.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Wesley's Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick make an unusually strong pairing for a medical classics library. The sermons define Methodist teaching on salvation, new birth, sanctification, practical holiness, the means of grace, Christian perfection, money, self-denial, and social responsibility.
Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens at Arthur's Christmas court, where a green stranger interrupts the feast with a beheading game. Gawain accepts the challenge, cuts off the Green Knight's head, and must seek the Green Chapel a year later to receive the return blow.
Sonnet 116 is Shakespeare's most famous definition of love, and it works by saying first what love is not. The speaker opens with a phrase borrowed from the church's marriage service: he will not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony is less a single book than a layered dossier: a thirteenth-century Latin Vita by Pierre of Cambrai, a medieval shrine in the Brabant town of Geel, and a centuries-long practice of boarding mentally ill people with local families. The legend tells of an Irish princess whose widowed father, deranged by grief and desire, attempts to marry his daughter because she resembles her dead mother.
The Statesman (Politikos) is one of Plato's late dialogues, usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC. It continues the conversation of the Sophist, held the day before: a visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, has defined the sophist, and now, at Socrates' request, he undertakes to define the statesman or king.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older.
Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne's second book of Greek myths retold for children, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In a short introduction called The Wayside, Hawthorne pretends that the stories were written by his young friend Eustace Bright, a Williams College student who had told the first set to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshires; Eustace visits Hawthorne's snowy Concord hillside with six new stories, and Hawthorne agrees to act as editor.
The Abolition of Man is the text of three lectures C. S. Lewis gave as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, then part of the University of Durham, in February 1943, and published that year by Oxford University Press with the subtitle Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The first lecture, Men without Chests, begins with a small English textbook for schoolchildren, which Lewis calls The Green Book and whose authors he names Gaius and Titius out of courtesy.
In a Tuscan village the carpenter Mastro Cherry finds a log that cries out when he strikes it, and gladly hands it to his poor friend Geppetto, who carves it into a marionette and names him Pinocchio. The puppet runs off before his feet are finished, gets Geppetto taken to jail, and kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer when it warns him that disobedient boys come to grief.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Antichrist is Nietzsche's most direct assault on Christianity as a moral and cultural force. It argues that Christianity reverses life-affirming values, sanctifies weakness, elevates pity, falsifies psychology, and turns resentment into virtue.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Art of the Commonplace gathers Wendell Berry's agrarian essays on land, household, work, food, technology, economy, conservation, and the moral scale of community. The collection's title points to Berry's method: he resists abstraction by returning arguments to farms, watersheds, kitchens, tools, soil, neighbors, and inherited obligations.
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Blue Fairy Book (1889), edited by Andrew Lang, gathers European fairy tales into one household volume that became the first of the famous colored fairy books. Lang and his collaborators retell stories from Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, and other streams so that children meet Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, and many less anthologized tales in a single readable English.
The Boxcar Children follows four orphaned brothers and sisters: Henry, fourteen; Jessie, twelve; Violet, ten; and Benny, six. After their parents die, the children set out on their own rather than go to their grandfather, whom they have never met and believe to be a hard man who disliked their mother.
The Burke-Paine debate is the exchange between Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790) and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (Part I, March 1791; Part II, February 1792), the most famous controversy among the many British pamphlets provoked by the French Revolution. This entry is a guide to the debate as a whole; it has no text of its own, and the two books are in the library separately with their full texts.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
The Federalist Papers are eighty-five essays written to persuade New York voters to ratify the proposed United States Constitution. Published under the shared pseudonym Publius, they defend a stronger federal union against fears that centralized power would destroy liberty.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
Book VI of Polybius's Histories interrupts his narrative of the Second Punic War at its darkest moment for Rome, the defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, to explain how a city that had just lost an army could recover and, within fifty-three years, bring nearly the whole known world under its power. His answer is the Roman constitution.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire runs in seventy-one chapters from the age of the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the condition of the city of Rome in the fifteenth century. The library holds a selection from the Milman edition, with Gibbon's footnotes and the added notes of the editors: Chapters I to III, the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West that close the third volume, and Chapter LXVIII on Mahomet the Second and the capture of Constantinople.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The Hundred Dresses is a short novel in seven chapters about a girl who is teased at school and the classmate who watched and said nothing. Wanda Petronski, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, Jan Petronski, lives with her father and brother Jake in a shabby house on Boggins Heights, outside a small Connecticut town.
The Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
The Journey of the Mind into God is Bonaventure's compact map of contemplative ascent, written after meditation on Francis of Assisi's vision of the six-winged seraph at La Verna. The work is structured around six stages, corresponding to the seraph's wings, by which the mind rises through creation, the self, and the names of God before passing beyond conceptual mastery into ecstatic union.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are the seven joint debates held between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic incumbent, during the 1858 contest for a United States Senate seat from Illinois. Senators were then chosen by the state legislature, so the two men were campaigning for legislative candidates of their parties.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens during the Second World War, when Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are sent away from London because of the air raids to stay in the great country house of an old Professor. On a rainy day of hide-and-seek, Lucy, the youngest, climbs into a wardrobe in an empty room and comes out in a snowy wood beside a lamp-post.
Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included.
Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) gathers the Sherwood outlaw tales into one continuous prose romance for young readers: archery contests, Lincoln green fellowship, clever rescues, and courtesy toward the poor in the days of King Henry. Pyle’s Robin is bold and playful rather than grim; Little John, Friar Tuck, and the merry men turn skill into loyalty.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Newburgh Address is the speech George Washington read to the officers of the Continental Army on 15 March 1783 in the Temple, a large log hall the soldiers had built at their winter cantonment near Newburgh, New York. The fighting had largely ended after Yorktown, and peace with Britain was close, but the officers had gone unpaid for months.
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
Les Passions de l'âme, published in Amsterdam and Paris in November 1649, was Descartes's last book and his fullest account of how mind and body interact in emotional life. It grew out of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who in 1643 had asked him how an immaterial thinking soul could move a body, and who later pressed him on the regulation of grief and the good life.
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is the dream-allegory of Christian fleeing the City of Destruction with a burden on his back, seeking the Celestial City through Slough, Wicket Gate, Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle. Written by a tinker-preacher in prison, it became the English-speaking world’s most widely read religious narrative after Scripture.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Practice of the Presence of God gathers four conversations with, and fifteen letters by, Brother Lawrence, a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris who spent his days in the friary kitchen. The conversations were written down by a visitor, traditionally identified as Joseph de Beaufort, who first met him on 3 August 1666.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Princess and the Goblin (1872) sends Princess Irene into a mysterious tower where her great-great-grandmother spins a thread of protection, while young miner Curdie discovers goblin plots in the mountain’s underworld. George MacDonald joins fairy-tale wonder to moral courage: Irene must trust what she cannot always see, and Curdie must act with grit when songs and stones are weapons against creatures who hate verse and running water.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a long essay in two parts asking why modern rational capitalism, with its disciplined, systematic pursuit of profit as a duty, arose first and most strongly in the Protestant lands of the West. Weber does not argue that Protestantism caused capitalism, and he says so explicitly; he argues that certain forms of Protestant belief helped produce an ethos, a moral attitude toward work and wealth, that fitted the needs of a new economic order.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself.
The Rights of War and Peace (De jure belli ac pacis libri tres) is Hugo Grotius's treatise on the law that binds nations and rulers in war, published in Paris in 1625, seven years into the Thirty Years' War and while its author lived in exile from the Dutch Republic. The complete work has three books: Book I asks what war is, whether war can ever be lawful, and who holds the sovereign power to wage it; Book II examines the just causes of war, chiefly defence, the recovery of property and the punishment of wrongs, and with them property, contracts, treaties, embassies and the right of burial; Book III treats what may be done in war and the moderations (temperamenta) that humanity and good faith impose even on lawful force.
Ammianus Marcellinus wrote his history in thirty-one books, beginning with the accession of Nerva in AD 96, where Tacitus had stopped, and ending with the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378. The first thirteen books are lost.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights is the first of Howard Pyle's four Arthurian volumes, drawn chiefly from Malory and told in a deliberately antique English with Pyle's own illustrations. It has two books.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) is Beatrix Potters short picture-story of a disobedient young rabbit who squeezes under Mr. McGregors gate after his mother has warned him away—his father, she reminds them, was put in a pie. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail gather blackberries; Peter eats lettuces, beans, and radishes until he meets Mr. McGregor, loses his shoes and blue jacket, hides in a watering can, and at last slips home frightened and unwell.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention at Williamsburg on 12 June 1776, three weeks before the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. On 15 May 1776 the same convention had instructed Virginia's delegates in Congress to propose independence and appointed a committee to prepare a declaration of rights and a plan of government.
An Act for establishing religious Freedom is a law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, passed by the General Assembly on 16 January 1786. Thomas Jefferson drafted it in 1777 as part of a committee's general revision of Virginia's laws after independence, and it was introduced in 1779, when it failed to pass.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in London by Strahan and Cadell on 9 March 1776, asks what makes a nation rich and what policies help or hinder that growth. Smith's answer is that wealth is not a store of gold and silver but the annual produce of a nation's labour, and that it grows chiefly through the division of labour, the accumulation of capital and the freedom to trade.
The Wind in the Willows (1908) follows Mole’s break into the sunlight, Rat’s river manners, Badger’s solid hospitality, and Toad’s reckless motorcar mania among the English riverbank and Wild Wood. Kenneth Grahame writes animal characters who keep human foibles without losing the feel of water, willow, and snow.
The Wise Woman is George MacDonald's fairy-tale parable of two spoiled little girls in an odd country where everyone wants what he has not got. Princess Rosamond, whose name means Rose of the World, has been given everything she cried for, including a silver disc to stand in for the moon, and has grown into a raging, greedy child who beats her pets and has nearly killed her nurse.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche in compressed diagnostic form. Subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, it tests inherited idols by sounding them for hollowness.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Understood Betsy follows nine-year-old Elizabeth Ann, an orphan raised in a medium-sized Midwestern city by her Great-aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances, a piano teacher who has studied child-rearing books and correspondence courses and is determined that her niece shall be thoroughly understood. Elizabeth Ann is thin, pale and frightened of dogs, thunder and examinations, and Aunt Frances shares and rehearses every fear with her.
James Herman O'Hagan was a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney. In July 1988 the London company Grand Metropolitan PLC retained the firm as local counsel for a possible tender offer for the Pillsbury Company.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy New York physician still grieving his brilliant dead wife and disappointed that Catherine lacks her mother's beauty and charm.
Washington had made it a crime to aid a suicide since its first territorial legislature acted in 1854. In January 1994 four physicians who treat terminally ill patients, led by Dr. Harold Glucksberg, joined three gravely ill patients (who died while the case was pending) and the nonprofit group Compassion in Dying in a suit in federal court.
Washington: A Life is Ron Chernow's single-volume biography of George Washington, published in October 2010 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2011. Chernow's central aim is to replace the remote, marble figure of patriotic legend with a man of strong passions, ambition and a fierce temper, held in check by a lifelong discipline of self-command.
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) opens in the Hundred Acre Wood, where a Bear of Very Little Brain lives under the name of Sanders and Christopher Robin asks for stories about him. A. A. Milne builds the book from short chapters of honey, balloons, floods, Heffalumps, Expositions to the North Pole, and birthday muddles.