The Billow and the Rock

It is the time of the 1745 Rebellion, when the adherents of Prince Charles, the Pretender to the Throne, landed in Scotland, and started to march towards London.

Lord Carse, and his friend Lord Lovat, are fearful that Lady Carse, who has some knowledge and evidence of their political beliefs, may betray them. So they abduct her from her home in Edinburgh and have her taken away to a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. She was at first a most unwilling prisoner, but gradually an instinct for survival let her eat and drink, and ride pillion, and so survive the journey.

The Edinburgh newspapers are fed a story of her illness, then of her death, and finally of her burial. So there is no hue and cry.

The story is well-written as one would hope from such an accomplished writer. It makes a good audiobook, but probably you will need to listen to it twice before the story and its background become clear to you.

Harriet Martineau. English writer, sister of James Martineau, born in Norwich, the daughter of a textile manufacturer of Huguenot descent. In 1821 she wrote her first article for the (unitarian) Monthly Repository; and then produced Devotional Exercises for the Use of Young Persons (1826), and short stories about machinery and wages. Her next book was Addresses for the Use of Families (1826). In 1829 the failure of the house in which she, her mother, and her sisters had placed their money, obliged her to earn her living. In 1832 she became a successful author through writing tales based on economic or legal ideas, in Illustrations of Political Economy, followed by Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833-34), and settled in London. After a visit to the U.S.A. (1834-36) she published Society in America, and a novel Deerbrook in 1839, and a second novel The Hour and the Man about Toussaint l'Ouverture. From 1839 to 1844 she was an invalid at Tynemouth, but recovered through mesmerism, (her subsequent belief in which alienated many friends), and made her home at Ambleside in 1845, the year of Forest and Game-law Tales. After visiting Egypt and Palestine she issued Eastern Life (1848). In 1851, in conjunction with H G Atkinson she published Letters on the Laws of Man's Social Nature which was so agnostic that it gave much offence; and in 1853 she translated and condensed Comte's Philosophie Positive. She also wrote much for the daily and weekly press and the larger reviews.

Taken with acknowledgement from the 1990 Chamber's Biographical Dictionary.

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