'In [Ashington Mechanics' Institute] library [Chester Armstrong] discovered a "new world", a "larger environment" in Defoe, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Dickens and Jules Verne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
'During these early years [Daphne du Maurier] filled her head with tales of adventure, romances, histories and popular novels, including such books as Treasure Island, The Snow Queen, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, Old St Paul's, The Tower of London, Nicholas Nickleby, Mr Midshipman Easy, Bleak House, Robinson Crusoe, The Mill on the Floss, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The seeds of her own novels were planted during these intensive, sometimes acted-out, reading sessions. The fascination with the sea, the importance of an historical sense of place, the theme of the dual personality, are all reflected in her reading during these formative years'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Daphne du Maurier Print: Book
'[Grace Macaulay's diary] entry for 2 March 1890 records that she "read the boys parts of Settlers at Home and Otto Spectere (sic), all of which Will as well as Aulay much enjoyed".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Grace Macaulay Print: Book
'When old enough to read for herself, Rose Macaulay entered into other realms of fictitious brave adventure. She devoured Masterman Ready, Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Coral Island, Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Prince and the Page
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Rose Macaulay Print: Book
'James Williams admitted that, growing up in rural Wales, "I'd read anything rather than not read at all. I read a great deal of rubbish, and books that were too 'old', or too 'young' for me". He consumed the Gem, Magnet and Sexton Blake as well as the standard boys' authors (Henty, Ballantyne, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Twain) but also Dickens, Scott, Trollope, the Brontes, George Eliot, even Prescott's "The Conquest of Peru" and "The Conquest of Mexico". He picked "The Canterbury Tales" out of an odd pile of used books for sale, gradually puzzled out the Middle English, and eventually adopted Chaucer as his favourite poet'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Williams Print: Book
[imaginative role play] 'One chauffeur's daughter alternated effortlessly between heroes and heroines: "I have plotted against pirates along with Jim Hawkins and I have trembled with Jane Eyre as the first Mrs Rochester rent her bridal veil in maddened jealousy. I have been shipwrecked with Masterman Ready and on Pitcairn Island with Fletcher Christian. I have been a medieval page in Sir Nigel and Lorna Doone madly in love with 'girt Jan Ridd'".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Wharton Print: Book
'Marjory Todd read [the books of Hesba Stretton, Mrs O.F. Walton and Amy le Feuvre but felt later that] "I would not now willingly expose a child of mine to the morbid resignation of any of these books... yet I think that children, when their home life is secure and happy, can take a lot of that debilitating sentiment... We sharpened our teeth on this stuff and then went on to greater satisfaction elsewhere", including "Pride and Prejudice", "Jane Eyre", "Alice in Wonderland", Captain Marryat, Kenneth Grahame, and E. Nesbit'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Marjory Todd Print: Book
'Lovely books she read to us...:"The Wide Wide World", with all the religion and deaths from consumption left out, and all the farm life and good country food left in; "Masterman Ready", with that ass Mr Seagrave mitigated, and dear old Ready not killed by the savages; "Settlers at Home", with the baby not allowed to die; "The Little Duke" with horrid little Carloman spared to grow more virtuous still; "The Children of the New Forest"; "The Runaway"; "The Princess and the Goblin", and many more'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henrietta Litchfield Print: Book
'Lovely books she read to us...:"The Wide Wide World", with all the religion and deaths from consumption left out, and all the farm life and good country food left in; "Masterman Ready", with that ass Mr Seagrave mitigated, and dear old Ready not killed by the savages; "Settlers at Home", with the baby not allowed to die; "The Little Duke" with horrid little Carloman spared to grow more virtuous still; "The Children of the New Forest"; "The Runaway"; "The Princess and the Goblin", and many more'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henrietta Litchfield Print: Book
'By the age of ten he had gone through E.W. Lane's three-volume translation of "The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night", Scott's Waverley novels, Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", the adventure stories of Captain Marryat, everything of Harrison Ainsworth, and other, now forgotten, works'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Somerset Maugham Print: Book
'Read Captain Marryats Settlement in Canada'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sydney Smith Print: Book
Mary Russell Mitford to Elizabeth Barrett, 3 March 1840:
'I had a kind message from Captain Marryat once [...] but I have never seen him. Without being one of his indiscriminate admirers, I like parts of his books (some of which I have read to my father), and have been told that they have done good in the profession -- suggestions
thrown out in them having been taken up and acted upon by the Lords of the Admiralty'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Russell Mitford Print: Book
'E[lizabeth] B[arrett] B[arrett] had read Marryat's [...] A Diary in America, With Remarks on
its Institutions (1839), in 1841'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'Don't read noble old Fred's Pirate anyhow; it is written in sand with a salt spoon: arid, feeble, vain, tottering production.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'[report by Mrs Ward of the library at her Passmore Edwards Settlement] boys were sitting hunched up over "Masterman Ready", or the ever-adored "Robinson Crusoe"; girls were deep in "Anderson's [sic] Fairy Tales" or "The Cuckoo Clock", the little ones were reading Mr Stead's "Books for the Bairns" or looking at pictures'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: boys at the Passmore Edwards Settlement Print: Book
'Marryat's diary on Continent gives many interesting anecdotes of animals, but I am afraid to remember them, lest they should not be true'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'He [Joseph Conrad] would read to me for long periods and make birds and other things out of sheets of paper which he folded with great dexterity. [...] His choice of books always met with my approval; I believe he must have read them all during his youth and enjoyed re-reading them almost as much as I enjoyed listening. Among them were Charles Kingsley's "Greek Heroes", Fennimore [sic] Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans", "[The] Deerslayer", "The Pathfinder" and Captain Marryat's "Peter Simple", "[Mr] Midshipman Easy",etc.[...] Some of these volumes [...] are still on my bookshelves here with his signature inside the cover.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'He [Joseph Conrad] would read to me for long periods and make birds and other things out of sheets of paper which he folded with great dexterity. [...] His choice of books always met with my approval; I believe he must have read them all during his youth and enjoyed re-reading them almost as much as I enjoyed listening. Among them were Charles Kingsley's "Greek Heroes", Fennimore [sic] Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans", "[The] Deerslayer", "The Pathfinder" and Captain Marryat's "Peter Simple", "[Mr] Midshipman Easy",etc.[...] Some of these volumes [...] are still on my bookshelves here with his signature inside the cover.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'Evening wrote to Billy[.] Mammy read to us a very amusing book called "The little savage".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Florence Bell Print: Book
'"Been across before?" I asked him, condescendingly.
"Once or twice," he answered with a grin. "Have you?"
"A few times," I admitted largely; and I proceeded to entertain him with an account of various remarkable journeys I had made across the Irish Sea, the descriptive matter of these accounts being looted from Lever and other sources. When he apparently swallowed it all with nothing more than a faint grin, I grew more adventurous. I recounted a voyage I had made down the Portuguese coast (Peter Simple) and the Mediterranean (Midshipman Easy) ... I filled in the background of my Australian adventures with local colour from Robbery Under Arms and penetrated Darkest Africa with Stanley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Desmond Malone Print: Book
'"Been across before?" I asked him, condescendingly.
"Once or twice," he answered with a grin. "Have you?"
"A few times," I admitted largely; and I proceeded to entertain him with an account of various remarkable journeys I had made across the Irish Sea, the descriptive matter of these accounts being looted from Lever and other sources. When he apparently swallowed it all with nothing more than a faint grin, I grew more adventurous. I recounted a voyage I had made down the Portuguese coast (Peter Simple) and the Mediterranean (Midshipman Easy) ... I filled in the background of my Australian adventures with local colour from Robbery Under Arms and penetrated Darkest Africa with Stanley.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Desmond Malone Print: Book
'Every child was given a little volume called King
Edward's Realm, bound in imitation crimson
leather, which I found slow going. The fate of
books is strange. Perhaps it would be hard to get
a copy of it now though an immense number must
have been distributed through infant Britain. As
for reading, there was Little Folks, the Boy's Own
Paper, The Children of the New Forest, Fighting
the Flames, and plenty besides; but the book
appetite grew later.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Blunden Print: Book
