The Young Cadet

This story about a teenage boy sent off to the Far East as a cadet working for the East India Company, is used as an excuse by the author to describe the scenes and history of India to her presumed audience of young readers in early 19th century England.  There was a push at the time for the English publishing industry to produce educational and Christian books for young readers, the feeling being that knowledgeable, Godly, principled youngsters were necessary to the preservation of the empire.  For modern readers the descriptions she gives of India at the time, and her version of India’s history and England’s incursion into it, are both very interesting.  There is little apology for the British Empire’s colonialism in India as might be expected by 21st century readers—in fact, just the opposite: she describes the English incursion into India as beneficial to all parties.

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.