Nearly Lost But Dearly Won

Wilson wrote several books around the end of the 1870s. He had won a prize some ten years previously for the best book assessed by The Band of Hope, a Society devoted to helping the young never to take up drinking. This present book gives you the impression that it might well have been another one written to be entered into the competition. Anyway, if it was, it didn’t win.

It's quite a good story, but I think its trouble is, that it is neither a book that would appeal directly to teenagers, which one supposes was its target audience, nor yet to young adults. There is nothing like the amount of action we saw in "Frank Oldfield."

It is rather a short book, but one of its crowning glories is the set of ten line drawings by “MDH”. These are really superb, full of action and life, particularly where there are children or horses. I wish all childrens’ books were as well illustrated.

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