As We Go E-Book

Charles Dudley Warner

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "As We Go," Charles Dudley Warner crafts a reflective travelogue that blends vivid observations with a keen social critique, presenting a mosaic of American life in the late 19th century. Written with poignant yet accessible prose, Warner employs a blend of humor and satire to illuminate the intricacies of American culture, societal norms, and the burgeoning Industrial Age. The book's episodic structure invites readers to embark on a journey through various towns and regions, each chapter revealing unique characters and local quirks, capturing both the charm and contradictions of American society during a time of significant transformation. Charles Dudley Warner was a prominent journalist, essayist, and close associate of Mark Twain, whose influences are evident in Warner's stylistic choices and thematic explorations. His early experiences in Connecticut and his travels across America offered him a rich tapestry of cultural perspectives, shaping his understanding of the nation's complexities. A keen observer, Warner's background in journalism instilled in him a critical lens through which he viewed society, focusing particularly on issues of morality, progress, and regional disparity, making "As We Go" a mirror to his contemporaneous world. I highly recommend "As We Go" to readers interested in a nuanced portrayal of 19th-century America, as it deftly balances insightful commentary with engaging narrative. Warner's work serves as an essential lens through which today's readers can reflect on the everlasting themes of identity, innovation, and social change, making it a valuable addition to the canon of American literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

Leseprobe

Charles Dudley Warner

As We Go

Enriched edition. Essays on 19th Century American Society and Culture

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Megan Sharp

Edited and published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4064066238735

Table of Contents

Introduction

Synopsis (Selection)

Historical Context

As We Go

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

This is a book about learning to live attentively and civilly as the world quickens around us.

As We Go is an essay collection by the American writer Charles Dudley Warner, published in the late nineteenth century, when industrial expansion and urban growth were reshaping patterns of daily life. Rather than follow a plot, it gathers topical reflections that consider how people conduct themselves amid change. The “setting” is less a specific locale than the ordinary environments of the era—homes, streets, public spaces, and the countryside—filtered through an observant, cultivated perspective. Its genre is literary nonfiction, and its tenor is that of the period’s polished magazine essay, attuned to manners, morals, and the feel of common experience.

Readers encounter a book of short, self-contained pieces that invite unhurried attention. Warner’s voice is companionable and urbane, blending humor with clear-eyed scrutiny. The style is measured and poised, favoring supple sentences, modest irony, and a steady curiosity about how people think, speak, read, work, and relax. The mood remains genial even when probing, offering the satisfactions of conversation rather than argument. Without relying on spectacle, the collection rewards close reading of tone and implication. It is an experience of cultivated observation—part reflective stroll, part fireside talk—that draws its energy from ordinary scenes and the questions they quietly pose.

A central interest is the art of conduct: how individuals negotiate obligations to self and community, and how civility informs freedom. The essays also consider the uses of leisure and the claims of work, the nurture of taste and judgment, and the persistent friction between tradition and novelty. Warner writes from a world negotiating the promises and disruptions of modernity, yet he keeps attention fixed on the human scale—habits, manners, and choices. The result is a study of everyday ethics, asking what it means to be a considerate neighbor, a discerning reader, and a responsible participant in public life.

Formally, the collection favors brevity with a cumulative effect. Each piece can stand alone, yet together they map a sensibility: skeptical of fads, receptive to pleasure, and committed to clarity. The essays often proceed from a familiar scene to a reflective turn, exchanging anecdote for insight without solemnity. Humor functions as tact, softening critique while sharpening perception. The prose avoids jargon and grand systems, relying instead on concrete observation and balanced judgment. In this way, As We Go exemplifies a classic American essay tradition that prizes conversation, lucidity, and moral poise over polemic or ornament.

Contemporary readers may find the book unexpectedly current. Its concerns—public discourse, distraction and attention, the speed of change, the texture of community life—resonate in an era of rapid technological and social shifts. The essays offer neither nostalgia nor cynicism; they model a reflective patience that can steady judgment amid noise. They also ask what leisure is for, how reading shapes character, and how courtesy enables freedom rather than constrains it. By lingering over small decisions and shared spaces, the collection proposes that private habits have public consequences, and that the tone of a culture begins in the conduct of everyday encounters.

Approached today, As We Go offers an accessible entry into nineteenth-century American prose and a durable guide to living with attention. It invites readers to dip in at any point or to move steadily through, letting themes echo and accumulate. The reward is not a single revelation but a cultivated stance: alert to nuance, generous in judgment, and willing to find significance in ordinary scenes. For those interested in the essay as a form, it exemplifies economy, tact, and humane intelligence. For anyone curious about how to move through change with grace, it offers measured counsel and companionable wit.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

As We Go by Charles Dudley Warner is a late–nineteenth-century collection of short essays drawn from the author’s observations of everyday American life. The pieces, originally written for periodicals and gathered into a single volume, move from familiar domestic scenes to broader reflections on society and culture. Warner treats common experiences—home routines, public spaces, seasonal changes—as starting points for measured commentary. The book does not follow a continuous plot; instead, it presents a sequence of topical meditations that accumulate into a portrait of manners, tastes, and habits. Its organizing principle is progression of subjects, not narrative events, and its purpose is reflective rather than argumentative.

The opening essays set a ground of ordinary living: the cadence of days, the household as a center of order, and the small decisions that structure time. Warner notes how custom shapes comfort and how mild discipline enables leisure. His approach is descriptive, outlining the interplay between habit and spontaneity without insisting on a single ideal. By sketching familiar rooms, streets, and conversations, he situates readers within recognizable circumstances. These pieces establish the collection’s method: starting with the near at hand, moving outward in scope, and returning to the personal sphere to consider consequences for conduct and contentment.

From domestic frames, the book turns to reading and the circulation of ideas. Warner considers libraries, the uses of study, and the difference between fleeting fashions in print and works that sustain attention over time. He notes how popular taste and serious inquiry coexist, and how the newspaper accelerates information while complicating judgment. The essays sketch the reader’s role as chooser among abundance, balancing entertainment with self-improvement. Without prescribing a canon, he summarizes the conditions that help reading become formative rather than merely habitual, and he touches on the social function of shared texts as a common reference in public conversation.

Travel and movement follow as another theme. Warner examines the appeal of going elsewhere—the train’s speed, the city’s bustle, the country road’s quiet—and how these settings sharpen observation. He contrasts the promise of novelty with the anchoring value of home, suggesting that the meaning of travel depends on the traveler’s attentiveness. The sketches emphasize process over destination: what one notices in stations, thoroughfares, and inns; how distance alters perspective; and how returning clarifies what was left behind. Rather than celebrating restlessness, the essays outline travel as a practical education in scale, difference, and restraint.

Attention then shifts to social customs and the art of getting along. Warner describes visiting, conversation, hospitality, and the informal codes that make gatherings agreeable. He observes the tension between display and sincerity, noting how public behavior can drift toward performance if not checked by consideration. The pieces summarize the small courtesies that ease friction—punctuality, listening, proportion in speech—and the missteps that unsettle them. Without turning moralistic, the essays identify manners as a shared language that translates private intentions into public comfort, keeping individuality intact while acknowledging the expectations of a crowded, interdependent society.

The collection also considers the pressures and conveniences of modernity. Warner reviews the effects of rapid communication, new devices, and expanding networks on attention, timekeeping, and community life. He outlines advantages—efficiency, access, connectedness—alongside costs, such as distraction and thinning personal contact. The question is practical: how to use tools without letting them define the tempo of thought or the measure of success. These pieces neither condemn nor celebrate innovation wholesale; they describe conditions under which technology serves rather than governs, and they point to deliberate pacing as a means of preserving judgment in a fast environment.

Nature and the seasons provide a counterweight to urban speed. Warner’s essays on gardens, weather, and rural scenes note how outdoor rhythms recalibrate expectation. He describes the satisfactions of tending, waiting, and observing, treating landscape as both setting and teacher. The sketches summarize what the countryside supplies that the city cannot—quiet intervals, visible cycles, proportion—and how those qualities return with the reader to town life. The focus remains descriptive rather than lyrical: the practical gains of fresh air, the clarity that comes from distance, and the steadying effect of recurring natural markers on memory and mood.

Civic themes appear as the book widens its lens to institutions and public roles. Warner outlines the responsibilities of citizenship in ordinary terms: attention to local affairs, respect for law, and patience with gradual improvement. He describes how public discourse forms through clubs, churches, schools, and the press, and how participation helps convert private opinion into common action. Rather than offering a program, the essays enumerate conditions that sustain trust—transparency, steadiness, and a regard for fact. The emphasis is on shared norms that allow disagreement without rupture, linking personal self-command to the health of the community.

The closing pieces return to individual conduct and the uses of moderation. Warner gathers threads from home, books, travel, society, technology, nature, and civics to suggest a coherent habit of life: attentive, proportioned, and open to correction. He refrains from conclusions that aim to settle disputed questions; instead, he collects examples that show how small choices scale into character. The book’s overall message is practical: cultivate taste without pretension, keep pace without haste, seek novelty without neglecting what endures, and treat others with consideration. As We Go ends where it began—with everyday scenes—now seen in a steadier light.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

As We Go emerged out of the late nineteenth-century United States, when the Gilded Age was giving way to early reform impulses. Charles Dudley Warner wrote from the vantage of Hartford, Connecticut, and the broader urban Northeast, but his essays circulated nationally through magazines before being gathered in book form in the early 1890s. The setting is a rapidly modernizing America: streets wired for telegraph and telephone, railroads linking regions after the 1869 transcontinental completion, and cities experimenting with electric lighting in the 1880s. Warner’s observations of manners, civic conduct, and everyday routines are framed by this milieu of bustling streets, expanding markets, and a professional middle class in ascendance.

Postbellum industrialization and urbanization form the essential backdrop. Between 1860 and 1900, the share of Americans living in urban places roughly doubled, rising from about 20 percent to nearly 40 percent. Railroad trackage grew from roughly 30,000 miles in 1860 to over 160,000 miles by 1890, while large enterprises consolidated into trusts, such as Standard Oil’s 1882 trust arrangement and the rise of Carnegie Steel in the 1890s. Manufacturing output and per capita income trended sharply upward, and department stores, mail-order catalogs, and national brands reshaped consumption. Warner’s essays, attentive to pace, etiquette, and civic comportment, mirror the strains of crowded sidewalks, the temptations of new consumer abundance, and the duties of citizenship in an impersonal, corporate economy. His urbane tone registers both admiration for material progress and unease at its social costs, especially the erosion of communal norms amid rapid mobility and wealth concentration.

Civil service reform and anti-corruption campaigns were pivotal political currents in the 1880s. The assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 by Charles Guiteau intensified demands to end the spoils system, leading to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which established competitive exams and protected certain federal employees from patronage dismissals. Reform-minded Republicans known as Mugwumps influenced the closely fought 1884 presidential election. As a prominent editor and commentator, Warner aligned with the ethic of public virtue and administrative probity these movements advanced. In As We Go, his steady insistence on moderation, responsibility, and civic duty echoes the reform program to professionalize governance and check partisan excess.

Mass immigration and the controversies it provoked are central to the era’s social context. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 signaled a new federal role in restricting entry, while Ellis Island opened in 1892 as the principal inspection station for arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1910, roughly 18 million immigrants entered the United States, reshaping cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Settlement houses such as Jane Addams’s Hull House, founded in Chicago in 1889, sought to ease urban dislocation. Warner’s city-minded essays track the daily frictions and accommodations of a plural society, attending to public behavior, civility, and the obligations entailed by dense, diverse urban life.