Preface The Committee of the United Kingdom Band of Hope Union having offered prizes of One Hundred Pounds, and Fifty Pounds respectively, for the two best tales illustrative of Temperance in its relation to the young, the present tale, “Frank Oldfield,” was selected from eighty-four tales as the one entitled to the first prize. The second tale, “Tim Maloney,” was written by Miss M.A. Paull, of Plymouth, and will shortly be published. Appended is the report of the adjudicators:—

We the adjudicators appointed by the Committee of the United Kingdom Band of Hope Union, to decide upon the Prize Tales for which premiums of One Hundred Pounds, and Fifty Pounds, were offered by advertisement, hereby declare that we have selected the tale with the motto “Nothing extenuate, or set down aught in malice,” as that entitled to the First Prize of One Hundred Pounds; and the tale with the motto “Hope on, Hope ever,” as that entitled to the Second Prize of Fifty Pounds.

As witness our hands, Thomas Cash, T. Geo. Rooke, B.A., John Clifford, M.A., Ll.B., &c.

United Kingdom Band of Hope Union Office, 5 Red Lion Square, London. August 3, 1869.

This book was well-written, and generally exciting throughout, although one of the early chapters was a bit lacking in action (people seated round the dinner-table). The action was credible and well described. The whole thing rang very true, and for that reason might be read by someone wishing to gain more knowledge of life two-thirds of the way through the nineteenth century. The Reverend Wilson writes well, and it would be pleasant to seek out and read other books from his pen.

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