W H G Kingston: 144 books

Fred and his brother have an adult friend, Cousin Giles, who is a naval officer who had served under the boys' father, before injury had compelled his retirement. One day Cousin Giles asks the boys to come with him on a visit to Russia. This was 1856. The boys' mother is glad they are not going too...

This book is definitely intended for the younger ones. Kingston does not really show how humorous he can be in most of his books, but this book is definitely meant to be funny and succeeds. Two elderly minor nobles agree that they will set out on a voyage to see the world. They set out on it, but their...

Kingston seems to be quite good at writing about South America. One wonders why he is so anti-Spanish, but as he was brought up living in Portugal this may have something to do with the matter. We are taken on a tour round Venezuela (that's the country on the north of South America, that has lots of...

Here Kingston gives us a story of a young boy who had been handed to a British seaman, Dick, at a place in the West Indies which had just been attacked by the British. The boy's nurse, a coloured woman, had received a fatal wound. The boy is brought up by Dick on board ship, but there are all sorts...

Another well-written yarn by Kingston, with a background of Indian territory in the Red River area of North America. Plenty of action, ambushes, shootings, fast rides on horseback, and other incidents apparently typical of the life of those days and in such a place. According to Wikipedia: "William...

Bill's father is a wherry-man in Portsmouth Harbour, who one day has an accident and is killed. Bill's mother is a seller of apples. The whole family are a happy, good-humoured lot. Bill is befriended by a Captain Trevelyan, who offers him a boy seaman's place in his ship, the Lilly. So Bill goes...

This is quite a difficult book to get the gist of. It is a tale of inheritance. A family inhabiting a castle in Shetland, a group of islands to the north of Scotland, is also apparently entitled to a titleand lands in Spain and elsewhere. But who of the Shetland family is the rightful heir? The Spanish...

This book is not a series of fictitious adventures of the great Captain Cook, the eighteenth century navigator and explorer, but a straightforward statement of his life and achievements. It is therefore more of a biography than an adventure book for boys. However, the man was so great that his biography...

It is in the middle of the sixteenth century, and in Spain, where the Inquisition, and subsequent torturing and burning to death by the Catholic Church, of those who would not agree to its tenets, is getting under way. An Archbishop calls at the house of a former friend of his, a woman who had refused...

A very short book, and a fairly early one of the author's. The subject matter is the early days of the Reformation, and the time at which the Roman Church was trying to prevent ordinary people from reading the Bible in general, and the Gospels in particular. The Woodcutter with his son and his donkey...

This story takes place mainly in or near the Rocky Mountains of North America, as we follow the adventures of a member of an emigrant party during their move to California. Rattle-snakes, bears, rock-slides, avalanches, steep descents, and many other hazards, to say nothing of numerous attacks by unfriendly...

According to Wikipedia: "William Henry Giles Kingston (28 February 1814 - 5 August 1880), writer of tales for boys, was born in London, but spent much of his youth in Oporto, where his father was a merchant. His first book, The Circassian Chief, appeared in 1844. His first book for boys, Peter the Whaler,...

According to Wikipedia: "William Henry Giles Kingston (28 February 1814 - 5 August 1880), writer of tales for boys, was born in London, but spent much of his youth in Oporto, where his father was a merchant. His first book, The Circassian Chief, appeared in 1844. His first book for boys, Peter the Whaler,...

This is a quite long book, very well written, about a trip down the Amazon. There is rather a lot of "Natural History", but not too much, because it has all been made easy to follow, and is very interesting. All sorts of interesting things happen on this voyage. It is a rather curious thing that one...