Witness to the Deed

This is indeed rather an extraordinary book, in many ways not in the usual style of Fenn, yet in others in a style that few but Fenn could rise to.

One of the problems with this book is that, at least in the early chapters, there are flashbacks in the text, most unusual in the nineteenth century, though regrettably an oft-used device in the writing of today. This does make it difficult to follow the story, but you just have to push on with the work, and you will be rewarded in the end.

A young girl, the daughter of an admiral, had previously married a man who turned out to be a forger, and who was believed to have died. The hero of the book was due that day to marry her, and was very much in love with her. Just as he is departing for the church, a visitor appears, and states that, far from being dead, he is the girl's husband. He demands money: there is a fight; two pistol-shots are fired; the bridegroom-to-be does not turn up at the wedding; several people are seriously upset, and remain so throughout the book. Matters do not clear up until the very end of the book.

You could probably call this a psychological novel, and, as such, it is not really suitable for children, as most of Fenn's novels are. It is quite a long book, longer than most others by Fenn, and it demands great concentration throughout. If you are reading it for the second or third time, you could listen to an audio version of it, but we would advise reading it from the screen when first you read this book.

The type used was very clear, and the book was easily digitised, but unfortunately there were numerous type-setting errors, which all had to be sought out and corrected. Hopefully there are very few left. Be a brave soul and try this book, taking your time over it.

George Manville Fenn lived from 1831 to 1909, and was a prolific writer of boys' adventure stories. He also wrote serialised books for the various boys' periodicals.

The feature that is common to most of his books is the method of sustained suspense that he employed. He wrote, in explaining this, that he relied upon the human desire to unravel a mystery, to retain his readers' attention. He was able to retain their interest right up to the very last page, by building up mysterious and dire situations one upon the other. You are constantly left asking, "How does he get out of this one?" It is just this aspect that makes transcribing his books to e-texts such fun.

George Manville Fenn, English writer of juvenile stories, was born in London January 3, 1831. He was educated at private schools, then attended Battersea Training College for Teachers from 1851 to 1854. He was Master of a small school in Lincolnshire for a time, then became a printer and published a small magazine of poetry, "Modern Metre," in 1862. Two years later he was part owner of the Hertfordshire and Essex Observer, another unsuccessful venture. He then began writing for various periodicals, such as Chamber's Journal and All the Year Round, and was editor of Cassell's Magazine in 1870, and of Once a Week from 1873 to 1879. He soon began to pour out a flood of books for boys, as well as a few novels, many of which were reprinted in America, and before his death he had published between 175 and 200. He was married in 1855 to Susanna Leake, and by her had two sons and six daughters. He died August 26, 1909.

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 Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner 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 ABBYY Finereader 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