I cannot truthfully say that I enjoyed transcribing this book. That might be to say that Reverend Wilson would not approve of me, for I enjoy a beer or a glass of wine occasionally, but never to excess. But Wilson was, as ever, fulminating against the Demon Drink, that is to say, against the Demon that can take over people’s lives, and bring misery to their wives and children, for this does happen, even to this day.

There is a story behind all this, but the long sermons pervade, and do really make the book difficult to read. Perhaps you should read the book during some fasting and penitential period of the year, such as Advent or Lent, but then again it might bring on some other kind of sin, such as Sloth.

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Reverend Theodore Percival Wilson.

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