It is 1982 and twins Beth and Mike aged 14 and brother Jake 121/2 are itching to start their 15 visits to Victorian times, following their exciting and dangerous visits to both the 'Puritan' and 'Georgian' eras. The gift of time travel left to them by Great Uncle Seddie. Their great uncles and great aunt visited same eras when young back in early 1900s. They have now, Sooty, a small black dog unexpectedly brought back from the Georgian period adventures and have hidden him from their parents. The Victorian's steam engines and new road surfaces, makes travel easier as they see the troubles that befall the poor, with hiring fairs and the down trodden pottery workers. The trio take pity on a sweep's boy they saw being abused by his cruel master while at the 'Grand Fair' with its attractions. The youngsters come to the aid of a mother whose babies are being sold by a baby minder. They continue searching as to what happened to their Great Uncle James who they meet and left back in Georgian times.

Time travel adventure. A three part saga. This book covers the first two periods of the visits back in time made by 12 year old twins, Mike and Beth and younger brother Jake.There are 15 exciting, worrying and dangerous visits to the each of eras of Cromwell, the Georgians and finally Victorians spread over a 3 year period. We go with them as they mingle with the villagers, seeing how their local village changes over the centuries. How will they cope with the challenges of the periods, firstly ruthless roundheads hunting royalists and even witches and later, highwaymen and smugglers? The trio soon realise what pitiful lives some children younger than themselves were forced to live when visiting the tin mine. All the while we see how they grow up into young teenagers in the 1980s. Their adventures are exciting, some sad and others surprising as we walk with them through history. These stories are suitable for all the family from 8 to 80 years old

Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "great American novels"—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But these great works did not spring fully formed from the heads of their creators. All three relied on conventions of short fiction built up during the "culture of beginnings," the three decades following the War of 1812 when public figures glorified the American past and called for a patriotic national literature. Decentering the novel as the favored form of early nineteenth-century national literature, Lydia Fash repositions the sketch and the tale at the center of accounts of American literary history, revealing how cultural forces shaped short fiction that was subsequently mined for these celebrated midcentury novels and for the first novel published by an African American. In the shorter works of writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia Maria Child, among others, the aesthetic of brevity enabled the beginning idea of a story to take the outsized importance fitted to the culture of beginnings. Fash argues that these short forms, with their ethnic exclusions and narrative innovations, coached readers on how to think about the United States’ past and the nature of narrative time itself. Combining history, print history, and literary criticism, this book treats short fiction as a vital site for debate over what it meant to be American, thereby offering a new account of the birth of a self-consciously national literary tradition.

The essays in this volume examine the full breadth and complexity of the extensive oeuvre of American literary pioneer Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867).