This book, one of Emily Holt's many historical novels, is set in the reign of Elizabeth, around the time of the Armada, which has a chapter to itself. The story revolves round a moderately well-off family, who really did exist, many details of the family being given in the last chapter, or Appendix. In order to make the story realistic there are a number of fictitious persons, but there is always a note to that effect when the person first appears. In general these fictitious persons are no more than minor characters.

There is an interesting passage in which Jack, one of the youths of the family, obtains a place at Court, but finds he needs to spend enormous amounts on apparel to keep up with the other young men he meets. By no means does the family have the resources to pay his trade-debts, and it turns out that his gambling debts, known as "debts of honour" are even greater. They had to tell him to go away and sort it out for himself.

But it must be said that a great deal of the book is taken up with religious discussions, mostly centring on the perceived imperfections of the Papist religion, as opposed to the Protestant. If you are not interested in this it does tend to make the going a bit heavy at times. But if you are interested, well then, it makes good reading.

As ever with this author there are many words and phrases used which are now outdated. When they first appear a note of the current meaning is given, for instance "popinjay [parrot]". On the whole this is not confusing except where a word has changed or even reversed its meaning. We do not recommend learning by heart from a sort of vocab list, the words in use in Elizabethan times, unless you are studying that period in depth.

Emily Sarah Holt, 1836 to 1893.

There doesn't seem to be much information easily available about Emily Sarah Holt. She is not mentioned in "The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature". She wrote about fifty books, mainly for children, and published over a rather short period of her life. Most of her books could be classified as Historical Novels.

I have an impression from snatches I have read that she lived in a rather upper middle class part of London, which we would call today "South Kensington". It may be significant that she died in 1893 for there was a major flu epidemic that year, which lasted a couple of years after that.

Somebody wrote recently that second-hand copies of her books in good condition are in short supply because her readers, a hundred years ago and more, so much loved reading their copies that they "read them to bits". This may be a bookseller's hype, but there must be a grain of truth in it. It may well also be true of all the authors we present on, or in conjunction with, the Athelstane website.

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 Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner 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 ABBYY Finereader 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

The text version we present here has been optimised to be read with yBook.