Phil Benson
Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair
A prose romance set in the forested kingdom of Oakenrealm, where a squirrel can go about from end to end without touching the ground, in whi…
Beckside Lights
John Ackworth was the pen name of the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, a Methodist minister who was born in Snaith, Yorkshire, but spent much of his…
Mr. Moffatt
Mr. Moffatt owns a chemist's business in suburban Sydney, Australia, where he lives with his wife, Florence, and adult daughter, Naomi. The …
Cycling in the Alps
A guide to cycling in the European Alps in the days before surfaced roads and automobile tourism. As the author explains, the spectacular vi…
To the Lighthouse (Version 2)
Virginia Woolf's classic modernist novel explores the lives and thoughts of the Ramsays and their guests at the family's summer home on the …
Hartmann the Anarchist, or the Doom of a Great City
A gem of nineteenth-century science fiction from mountaineer, philosopher and occasional novelist, Edward Douglas Fawcett. Stanley, a wealth…
The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed
Cenydd Morus's (Kenneth Morris) imaginative retelling of tales from the Mabinogion, the great work of Welsh literature first recorded in the…
Kamakura
'Kamakura is nothing if she has no history, writes Japanese novelist, poet, and essayist Yone Noguchi. At the turn of the 20th century, Kama…
Dionysius the Areopagite, with other poems
An early figure in the birth of poetry in industrial Manchester, Ann Hawkshaw published three collections and another was circulated private…
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods
A limbless reptilian monster that propels itself through the swamps with a propellor-tipped tail? A creature so ashamed of its monstrous app…
The Story of Peterloo
On 16th August 1819 around 60,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to rally for parliamentary reform. Shortly after the me…
Ancient Songs and Ballads of Lancashire
Traditional songs and ballads from Lancashire in the north-west of England from the opening section of John Harland's collection, Ballads an…
Orlando, A Biography (version 3)
Virginia Woolf's most successful novel recounts the extraordinary biography of Orlando from his youth in the reign of Elizabeth I to her lif…
Wild and romantic: Early guides to the English lake district
A collection of some of the most significant literary work on the English Lake District prior to Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes (1778). …
Froth
Clementina is losing her youth in the fashionable world of late-nineteenth century Madrid and takes a younger lover. Meanwhile her father, t…
Manchester Poetry
Manchester's first published anthology of locally-written poetry was compiled by editor James Wheeler to show that Manchester, 'the most mec…
Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History
The history of Britain up to the Norman Conquest in the form of 100 prose commentaries, each followed by a sonnet. The commentaries set the …
Every Man His Own Art Critic
This collection includes two texts written to accompany two blockbuster art exhibitions: Every man his own art critic at the Manchester Exhi…
Two Cumberland Ballads
Two narrative ballads, based on local lore, by the Cumberland poet John Stagg. In 'The Hermit of Rockcliffe', a young fugitive takes refuge …
Geraldine Jewsbury in Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, 1846-47
'The most striking feature in the present day, far more than that of railways even, is the utter chaos into which all previously received pr…