To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. He was a great admirer of Byron, and some of his heroes are Byronic in temperament.Ī PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. He was a naturalist, and wrote about the creations of Nature, where many other Victorian authors would have been all moralising and pious. When he returned to England the publisher Davis Bogue suggested that he should write books specifically for boys, catering for the Christmas market each year. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature mentions that he was the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and that the first two books mentioned above were for a general readership. (With acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary) He went back to New York in 1867 and founded the Onward Magazine, but returned to England in 1870. Among his books, many of which were popular in translation in Poland and Russia, were The Rifle Rangers (1850), Scalp Hunters (1851), Boy Hunters (1853), War Trail (1851), Boy Tar (1859), and Headless Horseman (1866). His vigorous style and hairbreadth escapes delighted his readers. Returning to Britain in 1849, he settled down to a literary life in London. In 1840 he emigrated to New Orleans, settled as a journalist in Philadelphia (1843), and served in the US army during the Mexican war (1847), where he was severely wounded. Irish writer of boys' stories, born in Ballyroney, County Down. Nevertheless the result is excellent, the book is very readable, and it makes a good audiobook. To make matters worse practically every page of the copy used had been defaced by a rubber stamp of a previous owner, which made a day's work for the transcriber to clean up. The type-setting in this book was not very good, and it seems likely that Routledge used the type from an earlier edition.
Reid, having fought in the Mexican-American War of the 1850s, and having written books about the subject, would have wanted to make this excellent book available to an English-speaking readership, and his translation was published in 1861 with the title "A Hero In Spite Of Himself." The edition used was published by Routledge in 1890, some years after the author's death, with the title "The Tiger Hunter," which is what Costal was, though the tigers referred to were actually jaguars. Strictly speaking this book is a free translation by Reid (1818-1883) of an earlier (1851) book by the Frenchman Luis de Bellemare (pseudonym of Gabriel Ferry, 1809-1852), "Costal l'Indien." The subject is the 1811-1812 Mexican War of Independence from Spain.
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