The Literature of Roguery (1907) - Frank Wadleigh Chandler

• Vol. 1 (1907, 1-284)

• Vol. 2 (1907, 285-584)

The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (1908, 433) - Jean Jules Jusserand

Southern Fiction Prior to 1860 (1909, 126) - James Gibson Johnson

A Bibliography of English Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (1911) - John M. Clapp

This is an essay in which Mr. Clapp writes of his planned bibliography of 5000-5500 works of English prose fiction in the eighteenth century, and tells of how he expects to finish it that summer. I've thus far not discovered any trace of the actual beastie.

A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed Before 1740 (1912) - Arundell Esdaile

A Guide to the Best Fiction in English (1913, 813) - Ernest Albert Baker

Baker also wrote a book with the extremely enticing title "Half-Forgotten Books" which, alas, is not presently available via Google Books.

The English Novel Before the Nineteenth Century: Excerpts from Representative Types (1915, 794) - Annette Brown Hopkins, Helen Sard Hughes

The French Revolution and the ENglish Novel (1915, 337) - Allene Gregory

The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917, 329) - Dorothy Scarborough

Gilbert Gurney (1850, 452) - Theodore Edward Hook

The Republic of Fools (1861) - Christoph Martin Wieland

• Vol. 1 (1861, 312)

• Vol. 2 (1861, 311)

The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous: Who Was a Soldier, a Sailor, a Merchant, a Spy, a Slave Among the Moors, a Bashaw in the Service of the Grand Turk, and Died at Last in His Own House in Hanober Square (1863) - Goerge Augustus Sala

PREFACE In the last century—and many centuries before the last; but it is about the eighteenth that I am specially speaking—long before steamers and railways, or even frigate-built ships and flying coaches were dreamt of, when an Englishman went abroad, he stopped there. When he came back, if at all, it was, as a rule, grizzled and sunburnt, his native habits all unlearnt, and his native tongue more than half forgotten. Even the Grand Tour, with all that money could purchase in the way of couriers and post-horses, to expedite matters for my Lord, his chaplain, his courier, and his dancing master, took as many years as it now does months to accomplish. There were no young novelists in those days to make a flying-trip to the Gaboon country, to ascertain whether the stories told by former tourists about shooting gorillas were fibs or not. There were no English engineers, fresh from Great George Street, Westminster, writing home to the JthencEum to say that they had just opened a branch railway up to Ephesus, and that (by the way) they had discovered a prseImperial temple of Juno the day before yesterday. Unprotected females didn't venture in " unwhisperables" into the depths of Norwegian forests; or, if they hazarded such undertakings their unprotectedness led them often to fall into cruel hands, and they never returned. A great fuss used to be made, before the days of steam, about the " Fair Sophia," who undertook a journey from Turkey to discover her lover, Lord Bateman; but how long and wearisome was her travail before she reached his lordship's castle in Northumberland, and was informed by the "proud young porter " that he was just then " taking of his young bride in" ? Madame Cottin's Elizabeth, when she walked from Tobolsk to St. Petersburg to crave pardon for the exiles of Siberia; Sir Walter Scott's Jeanie Deans, when she tramped from Edinburgh to London on her errand of mercy, were justly regarded as heroines. But what were the achievements of those valorous young women when compared with the Ladies who make tours round Monte Eosa; nay, for the matter of that, " all round the world" ? B riy a plus de Pyrenees. Nay, there are no more Andes, Himalayas, or Eocky Mountains. When the late Mr. Albert Smith wanted to change the attractions of his show, he calmly took a trip from Piccadilly to Hong Kong; it would have been better for him, poor dear fellow, had he remained at home. When her Majesty wanted to show the late Sultan of Turkey a slight act of civility, she sent Sir Charles Young out to Constantinople to invest Abdul Medjid with the Order of the Carter. Thirty years ago, it is possible the estimable King of Arms might have thought a mail-coach journey to York a somewhat serious expedition, yet he took the P. and 0. Boat for Stamboul as blithely as though he were bound for a water-party at Greenwich. If an Emperor is to be crowned in Eussia, or Prussia, or Crim Tartary, all the London newspapers despatch special correspondents to the scene of the pageant. Mr. Eeuter will soon have completed his Overland Telegraph to China. At Liverpool they call New York "over the way." The Prince of Wales's travels in his nonage have made Telemachus a tortoise, and the young Anacharsis a stay-at-home. Married couples spend their honeymoon hippopotamus hunting in Abyssinia, or exploring the sources of the Nile. And the Traveller's Club are obliged to blackball nine-tenths of the candidates put up for election, because nowa-days almost every tolerably educated Englishman has travelled more than six hundred miles in a straight direction from the British Metropolis. Bearing these facts in mind, the travels of Captain Dangerous, widely extended as they were, may not appear to the present generation as very uncommon or very surprising. But such travellers as my hero, formed, in the last century, a class apart, and were, in most cases, very strange men. Diplomatic agents belonging to the aristocracy rarely ventured beyond the confines of Europe. The Ambassadors sent to eastern climes were usually, although accredited from the English Court, maintained at the charge of great commercial corporations, such as the Turkey and Bussia Companies, and were selected less on the score of their having handles to their names, or being born Eussells, Greys, and Elliots, than because they had led roving and adventurous lives, and had fought in or traded with the countries where they were appointed to reside. Beyond these, the travelling class was made up of merchants, buccaneers, spies, and, notably, of political adventurers, and English, Scotch, and Irish Eomanist Priests. The unhappy political dissensions which raged in this country from the time of the Great Rebellion to the accession of George the Third, and the infamous penal laws against the Eoman Catholics, periodically drove into banishment vast numbers of loyal gentlemen and their families, and ecclesiastics of the ancient faith, who expatriated themselves for conscience' sake, or through dread of the bloody enactments levelled at those who worshipped God as their fathers had done before them. The Irish and Scotch soldiers who took service under continental sovereigns sprinkled the army lists of France, of Spain, and of Austria with O's and Macs. There was scarcely a European city without an AngloSaxon or Anglo-Celtic monastery or nunnery, and scarcely a seaport without a colony of British exiles cast upon foreign shores after the tempests of the Boyne, of Sheriffmuir, of Preston, or of Culloden. When these refugees went abroad it was to remain for ten, for twenty, for thirty years, or for life. The travelling of the'present century is spasmodic, that of the last century was chronic. I do not know whether the " Adventures" I have ascribed to Captain Dangerous will be readily recognised as " strange." To some they may appear exaggerated and distorted, to others merely strained and dull. If truth, however, be stranger than fiction, I may plead something in abatement; for although I am responsible for the thread of the story and the conduct of the narrative, there is not one Fact set down as having marked the career of the Captain that has been drawn from imagination. For the story of Arabella Greenville, for the sketch of the Unknown Lady, for the exploits of the " Blacks" in Charlwood Chase, for the history of Mother Drum, for the voyage round the world, for the details of the executions of Lord Lovat and Damiens, for the description of the state of a Christian captive among the Moors, I am indebted, not to a lively fancy, but to boohs of travel, memoirs, Acts. of Parliament, and old newspapers and magazines. I can scarcely, however, hope that, although the incidents and the language in this book are the result of years of weary plodding and note-taking, through hundreds of dusty tomes, they will succeed in interesting or amusing the public now that they have undergone the process of condensation. The house need not be elegant because the foundations have been laboriously laid. A solid skeleton does not always imply a beautiful skin. It is possible, nevertheless, that many persons may cry out that what I have written of Captain Dangerous could not have occurred, with any reasonable amount of probability, to any one man. Let me mention the names of a score of men and women recently or still living, and let me ask the reader whether anything in my hero's career was stranger than the adventures which marked theirs ? Here is a penful taken at random, —Lord Dundonald, Lola Montes, Raousset-Boulbon, Eichard Burton, Garibaldi, Felice Orsini, Ida Pfeiffer, Edgar Poe, Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson (the Siberian travellers), Marshal St. Arnaud, Paul du Chaillu, Joseph Wolff, Dr. Livingstone, Gordon Cumming, William Howard Eussell, Eobert Houdin, Constantine Simonides, Barnum, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. The life of any one of these personages, truthfully written, would be a thousand times stranger than anything that is set down to Dangerous's account. Let me quote one little example more in point. Two years ago I wrote a story called the " Seven Sons of Mammon," in which there was an ideal character—that of a fair-haired little swindler, and presumable murderess, called Mrs. Armytage. The Press concurred in protesting that the character in question was untrue to nature, and, indeed, wholly impossible. Some details I had given of her violent conduct in prison were specially objected to as grossly improbable. I said at the time that I had drawn the woman from nature, and I was sneered at, and not believed. I now again declare, upon my honour, that this Mrs. Armytage, was a compound of two real people; that as regards her murdering propensities, I was, for the matter and the manner thereof, beholden to the French Gazette des Tribunaux for the year 1839; and that as respects her achievements in the way of lying, thieving, swindling, forging, and fascinating, I had before me, as a model, a woman whose misdeeds were partially exposed some ten years since in Household Words, who, her term of punishment over, is, to the best of my belief, alive at this moment, and who was re-married less than a year ago:—the announcement of that fact being duly inserted in the Times newspaper. The prison details had been gathered by me years before, in visits to gaols and in conversations with the governors thereof; and months after the publication of the "Seven Sons of Mammon," I found them corroborated in their minutest characteristics in a remarkable work called "Female Life in Prison." It remains for me to say one word as to the language in which the " Adventures ol Captain Dangerous'' are narrated. I had originally intended to call it a " Narrative in plain English;" but I found, as I proceeded, that the study of early eighteenth century literature—I mean the ante-Johnsonian period—had led me into the use of very many now obsolete words and phrases, which sounded like anything but plain English. Let me, however, humbly represent that the style, such as it is, was not adopted without a purpose, and that the English I have called " old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of Esmond; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous express himself as a man of ordinary intelligence and capacity would do who was born in the reign of Queen Anne,—who received a scrambling education in that of George the First,—who had passed the prime of his life abroad and had picked up a good many bastard foreign words and locutions,—whose reading had been confined to the ordinary newspapers and chap-books of his time (with perhaps an occasional dip into the pages of " Ned Ward" and " Tom Brown"),—and who in his old age had preserved the pseudo-didactic of his youth. The " Adventures of Captain Dangerous" have been, in every sense, an experiment, and not a very gratifying one. I have earned by them a great many kicks, but a very few halfpence. Should the toe of any friendly critic be quivering in his boot just now, at the bare announcement of " Captain Dangerous'" re-appearance, I would respectfully submit that there could not possibly occur a better opportunity than the present for kicking me de novo, as I have been for months very ill, and am weary, and broken.

• The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 (1863, 318) - George Augustus Sala

• The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 (1863, 315) - George Augustus Sala

• The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 (1863, 307) - George Augustus Sala

The Seven Sons of Mammon (1864, 465) - George Augustus Sala

Robert Dalby and His World of Troubles: Being the Early Days of a Connoisseur (1866, 324) - Robert Dalby

Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (1867, 195) - Douglas William Jerrold

Uncle Peter's Fairy Tale for the Nineteenth Century (1869, 478) - Elizabeth Missing Sewell

The Fantastic History of the Celebrated Pierrot (1875, 262) - Alfred Assollant

Miss Misanthrope (1877, 238) - Justin McCarthy

The New Republic: Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House (1878, 368) - William Hurrell Mallock

The Revolt of Man (1882, 358) - Walter Besant

A Strange Story; and, The Haunted and the Haunters (1884, 390) - Edward Bulwer Lytton

After London; or, Wild England (1886, 442) - Richard Jefferies

The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox: The Ventriloquist (1886, 602) - Henry Cockton

The Heptameron; or, Tales and Novels of Marguerite Queen of Navarre (1886, 392)

Beyond the Seas: Being the Surprising Adventures and Ingenious Opinions of Ralph Lord of St. Keyne, Told and Set Forth by His Cousin, Humphrey St. Keyne (1887, 462) - Oswald John F. Crawfurd

Aristocracy: A Novel (1888, 257)

The Inner House (1888, 195) - Walter Besant

The Wine-Ghosts of Bremen (1889, 64) - Wilhelm Hauff

A Prankish Pair: A Fantasy (1890, 208) - Paul Ginisty

The Friend of Death (1891, 163) - Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

News from Nowhere: An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (1891, 278) - William Morris

The Witch of Prague: A Fantastic Tale (1891, 435) - Francis Marion Crawford

The Countess Eve (1892, 240) - Joseph Henry Shorthouse

Donna Quixote (1892, 372) - Justin McCarthy

The Nights (1894) - Giovanni Francesco Straparola

• Vol. 1 (1894, 276)

• Vol. 2 (1894, 323)

The Green Carnation (1895, 211) - Robert Smythe Hichens

The Wood Beyond the World (1895, 273) - William Morris

Trilby: The Fairy of Argyle (1895, 80) - Charles Nodier

Flames: A London Phantasy (1897, 414) - Robert Smythe Hichens

Etidorpha; or, The End of the Earth, 7th Ed. (1897, 386) - John Uri Lloyd

The Countess of Pembroke's "Arcadia" (1898, 476) - Philip Sidney

A House-Boat on the Styx: Being Some Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades (1898, 171) - John Kendrick Bangs

The Lake of Wine (1898, 364) - Bernard Edward Joseph Capes

The Hooligan Nights: Being the Life and Opinions of a Young and Unrepentant Criminal (1899, 276) - Clarence Rook

A Sea Comedy (1899, 165) - Morley Roberts

The Enchanted Typewriter (1899, 170) - John Kendrick Bangs

The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance (1900, 341) - Richard Le Gallienne

The Brass Bottle (1900, 355) - F. Anstey

The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire (1900, 471) - Marie Corelli

The Column: A Novel (1900, 463) - Charles Marriott

Hypolympia; or, The Gods in the Island: An Ironic Fantasy (1901, 220) - Edmund Gosse

Emblemland (1902, 164) - John Kendrick Bangs

Olympian Nights (1902, 223) - John Kendrick Bangs

The Man in Black (1902, 212) - Stanley John Weyman

Hieroglyphics (1902, 206) - Arthur Machen

Castle Rackrent (1903, 85) - Maria Edgeworth

The Pursuit of the House-Boat (1903, 204) - John Kendrick Bangs

The Saint of the Dragon's Dale: A Fantastic Tale (1903, 133) - William Stearns Davis

The Well at World's End: A Tale (1903) - William Morris

• Vol. 1 (1903, 378)

• Vol. 2 (1903, 279)

The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1903) - Giovanni Boccaccio

• Vol. 1 (1903, 332)

• Vol. 2 (1903, 404)

The Adventures of Don Sylvio de Rosalva (1904, 443) - Christoph Martin Wieland

The Mirror of Kong Ho (1905, 308) - Ernest Bramah

When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy (1906, 391) - Guy Thorne

Pope Jacynth & Other Fantastic Tales (1906, 198) - Vernon Lee

Gesta Romanorum: Entertaining Stories Invented by the Monks as a Fireside Recreation, Whence the Most Celebrated of Our Own Poets and Others Have Extracted Their Plots (1906, 425) - Charles Swan, Wynnard Hooper

The Fool of Quality (1906, 427) - Henry Brooke

The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment (1906, 249) - George Meredith

The Robberies Company, Ltd. (1906, 404) - Nelson Lloyd

The Monk: A Romance (1907, 356) - Matthew Gregory Lewis

An edited version of a novel first published in 1795.

Gamble Gold (1907, 248) - Edward Abbott Parry

Manners for the Metropolis 1908, 122) - Frank Crowninshield

Better Dead (1908, 145) - James Matthew Barrie

Imperial Richenda: A Fantastic Comedy (1908, 337) - Rosamond Langbridge

Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies (1909, 607) - Ouida

The Autobiography of Methuselah (1909, 185) - John Kendrick Bangs

Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909) - Algernon Blackwood

The Education of Uncle Paul (1909, 339) - Algernon Blackwood

Why Did He Do It? (1910, 336) - Bernard Edward Joseph Capes

Thieves: A Novel (1911, 338) - Frederick Bausman

The Gnomes of the Saline Mountains: A Fantastic Narrative (1912, 181) - Anna Goldmark Gross

The Novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn (1913, 380) - Aphra Behn, Ernest A. Baker

Confessions of Con Cregan: The Irish Gil Blas (1913, 311) - Charles James Lever

A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913, 506) - Algernon Blackwood

The Wonderful Visit (1914, 245) - H. G. Wells

The Revolt of the Angels (1914, 342) - Anatole France

The Immortal Gymnasts (1915, 338) - Marie Cher

War Letters from the Living Dead Man (1915, 318) - Elsa Barker

The Extra Day (1915, 358) - Algernon Blackwood

Mogu, the Wanderer; or, The Desert: A Fantastic Comedy in Three Acts (1917, 115) - Padraic Colum

The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1917, 451) - Edwin Arnold

The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions (1917, 250) - James Branch Cabell

Professor Latimer's Progress: A Novel of Contemporaneous Adventure (1918, 347) - Simeon Strunsky

The Promise of Air (1918, 279) - Algernon Blackwood

Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (1919, 368) - James Branch Cabell

Luca Sarto: A Novel (1920, 358) - Charles Stephen Brooks

Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship (1920, 218) - James Branch Cabell

The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck: A Comedy of Limitations (1920, 368) - James Branch Cabell

Sinbad and His Friends (1921, 261) - Simeon Strunsky

The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking (1921, 330) - James Branch Cabell

Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances (1921, 356) - James Branch Cabell

The Demi-Gods (1921, 316) - James Stephens

The Bright Messenger (1921, 349) - Algernon Blackwood

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Perfidy of Captain Slyboots and Other Tales (1863, 219) - George Augustus Sala

Fantastic Stories (1865, 150) - Edward Yardley, Jr.

The Ramsbottom Letters (1872, 96) - Theodore Edward Hook

Fantastic Stories (1874, 157) - Richard von Volkmann

The Purcell Papers (1880) - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

• Vol. 1 (1880, 236)

• Vol. 2 (1880, 273)

• Vol. 3 (1880, 289)