An Embarrassing Orphan

Published in 1901; this digital version was transcribed from a 1904 re-print with illustrations by an American publisher.  Full of William Edward Norris’s famous wit and told from the viewpoint of a self-deprecating, first-person narrator, the story is about a staid, old, retired Englishman who is given charge of his nephew’s daughter to raise, and then must wrestle with an ethical conundrum—involving a secret about her inheritance—when she grows old enough for romance.  Naturally, as most fathers do with daughters when they come of age and begin to harbor romantic feelings, our narrator makes every mistake in the book.

This version of the novel includes four illustrations by the well-known artist John Steeple Davis.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.