About These Editions
This library is part of a project to make the works of F. D. Maurice freely available, in every useful form, to readers who have found his books hard to come by or hard to read in old scans.
How the texts are made
Each book begins as a page scan of a printed edition, named on the book’s page. The guiding principle is fidelity to the printed text: Maurice’s own spelling, capitalization, punctuation and emphasis are kept, together with the printer’s small capitals and ligatures (æ, œ). Where a plain printing error has been corrected, the correction is listed.
The scan is read by OCR and cleaned with the help of language models, and the result is then reviewed by a human editor against images of the printed page. The most recent editions record the whole process, including every emendation, under “About this digital edition” on the book’s page: each change the machine made was checked against the printed line, quotation marks were checked for pairing, italics (which OCR loses) were restored and reviewed page by page, and footnotes were verified against the page.
The forms they come in
Online. Every book can be read here, a chapter at a time. Use the contents button at the top left to move around the book, the arrow keys to turn pages, and the buttons at the top right to change the size of the text or switch between light and dark. Hovering over a paragraph shows a ¶ link you can copy to point someone to that exact passage. Search looks through the full text of every book at once.
EPUB is the format for e-readers, phones and tablets. PDF comes in two settings: one laid out as a printed book, and one set in a narrow page for reading on a phone. Word documents can be edited and reformatted, and the Markdown text is the source from which everything else is made.
EPUBs for listening are arranged for reading aloud by text-to-speech apps, with numerals spelled out and the apparatus of the printed page, such as title pages and tables of contents, set aside.
Modern English paraphrases
Some books also have a paraphrase in present-day English, restating Maurice’s text paragraph by paragraph. It follows the order and content of the original without adding interpretation. The paraphrases were drafted with the help of an AI language model and reviewed by a human editor. They are meant as a companion for readers who find Victorian prose slow going: read them alongside the original, switch between the two with the Original / Modern control at the top of the page, and quote from the original.
Chapter summaries
Each chapter has a one-sentence summary, shown under its title and in the book’s contents, to help you find your way to what you are looking for. The summaries were drafted with the help of an AI language model from the full text of each chapter. They are signposts, not Maurice’s words, and cannot carry the qualifications and turns of his argument.
Audiobooks
Narrations of many of the books, and of some of the paraphrases, are published on the F. D. Maurice Books channel on YouTube. The narration is computer-generated. Where a book has an audiobook, its page links to the playlist.
Corrections and questions
However carefully a text is checked, mistakes slip through. If you find one, please use the Report a mistake link at the foot of the chapter; select the faulty words first and they are sent along with it. For anything else, questions and suggestions included, use the contact form.
A companion site
This library has a companion, George MacDonald Books, made in the same way and in the same spirit. Maurice and MacDonald were friends who held each other in high regard. In London the MacDonalds worshipped at St Peter’s, Vere Street, where Maurice was the minister, and through him they joined the Church of England. MacDonald, the Scottish novelist, poet and preacher, had lost his pulpit for preaching a God whose love would let no one go, and found in Maurice a theologian who held the same hope. In his novel David Elginbrod he paid Maurice tribute in a London preacher: “I heartily trust that man. He is what he seems to be.”
Privacy
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Using these books
Maurice died in 1872, and his writings are in the public domain. The editions on this site are dedicated to the public domain too, under CC0: you may copy, print, share, adapt and republish the texts and the downloadable files, for any purpose, without asking.
The modern English paraphrases are new writing, and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may reuse them in the same way, provided you make clear that they are paraphrases of Maurice, not his own words, and say where they came from.
The design of this website and its own writing, such as the book introductions and these pages, are not covered by these licences. Please don’t copy them to make another site.