Long considered the author's strangest novel, this work is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-18th-century America. A mysterious shape-changing confidence-man approaches passengers on a Mississippi steamboat and,...
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell née Stevenson (1810–1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte...