BY G. Frank Lydston. Preface by Colin Heston

The wind howls across the desolate plains of the Old West, not with the romantic whistle of a ballad, but with the coarse, biting grit of reality. In the flickering shadows of a kerosene lamp, silhouettes gather around a scarred felt table, their faces etched with the histories of desperate gambles and hard-won wisdom. This is the world of G. Frank Lydston—a world where the line between the hero and the rogue is as thin as a worn playing card and twice as fragile.

In his seminal collection, Poker Jim, Gentleman, and Other Tales and Sketches, Lydston does more than recount anecdotes; he performs a literary autopsy on the American frontier. As a physician and a keen observer of human nature, he brought a surgical precision to his storytelling, looking past the polished myths of the "Wild West" to reveal the raw, pulsing nerves of the men and women who inhabited it. He understood that the wilderness was not merely a location, but a crucible that burned away the pretenses of civilization to reveal the true metal of the soul.

The titular character, Poker Jim, serves as the ultimate paradox of this untamed wilderness. He is a man who thrives in the so-called dens of iniquity, yet he carries himself with a code of ethics more rigid and unwavering than many of the city judges who would seek to condemn him. Through Jim and a cast of vibrant, often tragic figures, Lydston explores the profound duality of man, demonstrating how a gambler can possess the heart of a saint while a self-proclaimed gentleman might harbor the soul of a thief. To Lydston, the environment was never just a backdrop; it was a character in its own right—one that tested, broke, and occasionally redeemed the human spirit.

Lydston’s prose is a unique blend of Victorian elegance and frontier ruggedness, capturing the rough dialect of the mining camp and the sophisticated musings of the scholar with equal fervor. This collection stands as a testament to an era that was rapidly vanishing even as he wrote—a transition from lawless expansion to the paved certainty of the modern age. As you turn these pages, you step into smoke-filled saloons and silent, starlit canyons to witness the birth of a national identity forged in the fires of chance. You are invited to learn the philosophy of the hand: that life, much like the game itself, is rarely about the cards you are dealt, but the courage with which you play them.

Monarch Book Co., Chicago, 1906. Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.233.

By Walter Besant. Introduction by Colin Heston.

First published in 1893, The Ivory Gate stands among the late novels of Walter Besant, a writer whose career was defined by a sustained engagement with the moral, social, and psychological pressures of modern urban life. Appearing at the close of the Victorian era, the novel reflects both Besant’s long-standing commitment to social realism and his increasing interest in the interior life of the individual—especially the fragile boundary between aspiration and illusion.
The title itself announces the book’s governing metaphor. In classical and medieval literature, the “ivory gate” is the passage through which false dreams pass into waking life, as opposed to the gate of horn, from which true dreams emerge. Besant adapts this image to late-nineteenth-century conditions, using it to explore the seductive power of unrealized hopes, romantic delusions, and social fantasies that shape—and often distort—human conduct. The novel is less concerned with overt villainy than with self-deception: the quiet, persistent capacity of individuals to misread their circumstances and to substitute imagined futures for lived realities.
For modern readers, the novel remains strikingly relevant. Its exploration of illusion, self-fashioning, and the tension between inner fantasy and external reality resonates with contemporary concerns about identity, expectation, and social pressure. While its Victorian idiom and moral framework are firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, its psychological insights anticipate later treatments of self-deception and emotional displacement.
This new edition invites readers to reconsider The Ivory Gate not simply as a period piece, but as a thoughtful and understated meditation on the human tendency to live in dreams of our own making. In tracing the quiet tragedies that arise when those dreams eclipse judgment, Besant offers a work of enduring moral seriousness—one that illuminates both the anxieties of his age and the persistent vulnerabilities of our own.

A READ-ME.ORG CLASSIC REPRINT. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 321p.

Edited By Marlene Tromp Maria K. Bachman Heidi Kaufman.

In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy that transforms “foreign” people, bodies, and objects into perceived invaders with the dangerous power to alter the social fabric of the nation and the identity of the English. Essays in the collected edition look across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century to trace the myriad tensions that gave rise to fear and loathing of immigrants, aliens, and ethnic/racial/religious others. This volume introduces new ways of reading the fear and loathing of all that was foreign in nineteenth-century British culture, and, in doing so, it captures nuances that often fall beyond the scope of current theoretical models. “Xenophobia” not only offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to read the nineteenth century; it also advances and enriches our understanding of other critical approaches to the study of difference. Bringing together scholarship from art history, history, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies, Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia seeks to open a rich and provocative dialogue on the global dimensions of xenophobia during the nineteenth century.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 390.