This image is the cover for the book The Dynamiter, Classics To Go

The Dynamiter, Classics To Go

Excerpt: “Gentlemen,—In the volume now in your hands, the authors have touched upon that ugly devil of crime, with which it is your glory to have contended. It were a waste of ink to do so in a serious spirit. Let us dedicate our horror to acts of a more mingled strain, where crime preserves some features of nobility, and where reason and humanity can still relish the temptation. Horror, in this case, is due to Mr. Parnell: he sits before posterity silent, Mr. Forster’s appeal echoing down the ages. Horror is due to ourselves, in that we have so long coquetted with political crime; not seriously weighing, not acutely following it from cause to consequence; but with a generous, unfounded heat of sentiment, like the schoolboy with the penny tale, applauding what was specious. When it touched ourselves (truly in a vile shape), we proved false to the imaginations; discovered, in a clap, that crime was no less cruel and no less ugly under sounding names; and recoiled from our false deities."

Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson

Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1840-1914) was an American writer and the wife of famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Indiana, she had a difficult childhood marked by the death of her mother and her father's alcoholism. Fanny married three times and had children, but she divorced her second husband and left her children in the care of relatives. In 1870, she met Robert Louis Stevenson in France, and they fell in love. They had a tumultuous relationship marked by Fanny's ill health and financial difficulties, but they eventually married and traveled extensively together. Fanny became an important source of inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson and was credited with influencing his writing. Despite her own struggles with illness, Fanny was a vivacious and adventurous woman who loved to travel. She died in 1914, several years after her husband. Although she did not have a literary career of her own, she is remembered today as the wife of one of the most famous authors of the 19th century.

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