The Lamplighter - Softcover

Cummins, Maria S

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1494859912 ISBN 13: 9781494859916

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

The Lamplighter, one of the more popular books in the country when it was released in the mid-19th century, is an engaging story of a undisciplined and unloved girl who has her life transformed, by Providence, through the love of strangers, whose ties to her are greater than anyone initially suspects. It is well told and well written. It does start off slow, but moves fast after the girl -- Gertrude, or "Gerty" -- grows up. The last half of the book is, in particular, hard to put down. The "surprises" in the book are predictable, but the predictability is made up for in joy and the rewarding of goodness. It is primarily a story of the fruit of gratefulness, and secondarily a love story, though some may reverse the two. It is a religious book; the Bible is appropriately exalted. But a warning: While the third-person narrator rightly declares very early in the book that Christ died for Gerty, the two subsequent statements to the young Gerty, from two of the most noble characters, about how she might obtain a heavenly home instruct her "if you're good" and "if you try to be good and love everybody." Such instructions, which no character bothers to correct, are a rejection of the gift offered in the form of Christ's fully effective atoning sacrifice on the cross, and perhaps stem from the author's position, according to one brief biography, as a Sunday School teacher in a Unitarian church. - goodreads

About this title

About the Author

Maria Susanna Cummins was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on April 9, 1827. She was the daughter of Honorable David Cummins and Maria F. Kittredge, and was the eldest of four children from that marriage. The Cummins family resided in the neighborhood of Dorchester in Boston, Massachusetts. Cummins' father encouraged her to become a writer at an early age. She studied at Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's Young Ladies School in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1854, she published the novel The Lamplighter, a sentimental book which was widely popular and which made its author well-known. One reviewer called it "one of the most original and natural narratives". Within eight weeks, it sold 40,000 copies and totaled 70,000 by the end of its first year in print. She wrote other books, including Mabel Vaughan (1857), none of which had the same success. Cummins also published in some of the popular periodicals of her day.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1494859912
• ISBN 13: 9781494859916
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 514
• Editor: Books Laughing Loon
• Illustrator: Soucy Levi Harry