A beautifully designed deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from Simon Van Booy, nationally bestselling author of Father’s Day and The Illusion of Separateness
A young orphan goes from rags to riches in this remarkable tale of friendship, love, and adventure at the height of the Industrial Revolution.
Like Charles Dickens’s beloved David Copperfield, John Halifax is an orphan, determined to make his success through honest hard work. He becomes an apprentice to Abel Flecher, a tanner and a Quaker, and is soon befriended by Abel’s invalid son, Phineas, who chronicles John’s success in business and love, rising from the humblest of origins to the pinnacle of wealth made possible by England’s Industrial Revolution.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik explores the sweeping transformation wrought by this revolutionary technological age, including the rise of the middle class and its impact on the social, economic, and political makeup of the nation as it moved from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.
This collector's edition features a lush design, French flaps, and deckle-edged paper.
Author Info
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik was born in Staffordshire, England, in 1826. The daughter of a local minister, Craik was raised from an early age to value education and literature. She moved to London at the age of twenty and quickly became a popular author, publishing numerous short stories to considerable commercial and critical acclaim. An affable and witty conversationalist, Craik became something of a celebrity in London society. In 1854 she married George Lillie Craik, a partner with Alexander Macmillan at the publishing house Macmillan & Co. She died in 1887.
Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
