Tom, Dick, and Harry

Another of this author's well-written and entertaining school books. In this case the hero is young Master Jones. To prepare for entry to the school he had been given some tuition by a lady who was a teacher at a girls' school. Of course the other boys at the boys' school soon found out that he had come to them from a girls' school, and he became known, albeit affectionately, by the nickname of "Sarah".

But he is well respected, and enjoys his various friendships with the other boys, noticing even, at one point, that they seemed to be vieing with one another for his friendship.

Towards the end of the story his mother visits the school, and is a great hit with the other boys.

There some moments of drama, amusingly told, such as when our hero is unwittingly involved in almost blowing the school up! The boys involved off are hauled off to the magistrate by the local village policeman, who, comically, had imagined that a blazer, the top garment worn by schoolboys of that era (and mine) was a kind of lucifer, which in turn was a kind of match used before the invention of the safety-match. This is a particularly amusing episode, terminating in the magistrate awarding the school-keeper, who had been slightly injured, one guinea costs, to pay for his bandages, which he pays out of his own pocket.

There are no mountain-side dramas as in several other books by this author, and the rowing episodes on the river are quite tame. There are no wicked local beer-house owners. But it is a good story, quietly and evenly told. Best listened to rather than read.

REED, Talbot Baines (1852-93). English author of books for boys, born in London, the son of Sir Charles Reed (1819-91), chairman of the London School Board. He became head of his father's firm of typefounders, and wrote books on the history of printing (such as History of the Old English Letter-foundries (1887). His robust, moral, but entertaining school stories first appeared in the Boy's Own Paper. They include The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's (1881), The Master of the Shell (1887), and Cockhouse at Fellsgarth (1891).

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