This a very well written and interesting story, well up to Wilson's best. It deals with the various moral issues that beset a rather well-off family. The old father makes his two sons an allowance, which one of them, Amos, manages well, while the other does not. Stability in the family is provided by an old maiden aunt, Kate, the sister of the old man. There was also a daughter, Julia, who had married a ne'er-do-well, and who had been shown the door on that account by the old father, but who was still of great concern to the two young men, particularly to Amos, as she had small children, who were so destitute that Amos was spending all his allowance in looking after his sister and her children, thus making it impossible for him to lend his brother any money.

Because there are not many people in the story, and because their characters are so well-described, the reader is drawn into the family, and follows their concerns with interest. It makes a good audiobook of about eleven hours duration.

Reverend Theodore Percival Wilson, M.A., Brasenose College, Oxon, was Rector of St. Michael, Smethcote from 1862 to 1870; he died 8th August, 1881. Smethcote is a parish in the diocese of Lichfield, and in the rural deanery and hundred of Condover; it lies 9 miles south-west from Shrewsbury, and 5 miles north of Church Stretton. The population in 1881 was 283, and the area is 2,705 acres.

In 1852 he had been vicar of St. John's Church, Adelaide, South Australia. Adelaide figures largely in "Frank Oldfield", as also does Shropshire, the county in which Smethcote lies.

He was subsequently vicar of Pavenham, Bedfordshire, England.

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, and sometimes earlier than that. 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 here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk