That Beautiful Wretch

Published originally in 1881 (this eBook version is taken from the 1885 American edition) and taking place in the era of its publication date, That Beautiful Wretch (or The Beautiful Wretch in Britain) is simply a delightful romance that immerses the reader in small-town English life as experienced by 19th-century ladies and gentlemen.  Taking place mainly in the southern coastal town of Brighton, directly south of London on the English Channel, the author does a good job of painting with words the scenery and atmosphere along the shoreline, and the various characters he introduces.

William Black was a very popular and successful novelist while he was alive, whose fame for some reason did not maintain itself into the 20th century.  But whether accorded modern-era critical acclaim or not, readers of William Black novels will enjoy themselves enough to understand why they were so popular at the time they were published.  There is nothing better than a good romantic novel—and God help us if we ever reach a point as a species when such is not the case.

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.