This book starts off in Arundel where Captain Mason falls for a young girl maried to a older cold husband. The young captain Mason enters the Revolutionry war but is captured and put in Dartmoor prison. After a sucessfull escape he is caught with the young girl by her husband. He sends the man back to Captain Nason back to jail and has his own wife arrested. Captain Nasoon survives a massacre in Dartmoor prison but is realeased and is reunited with the youg girl.

I did not like this book. Not that the book was bad but I do not believe it was good. I'm writing a report on the book and I will try to post it on the internet so I can spare anybody the waste of time in reading this book.

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This novel, first published in 1931, has gone through many editions. It is written in the style of the period, e.g., Errol Flynn type stories. It goes into excessive detail at some points which can make the story drag a bit. In some ways, it reflects a Thomas Hardy type writing style. It is a narrative style as told by the main character. Some parts of the action were borrowed by later writers.

The setting is March 1812 to April 1815. Merchant captain Richard Nason is trading with the British, carrying supplies to the British Army in Spain, and is generally opposed to the war, when he is pressed aboard a British Royal Navy sloop. His attitude changes and (after escaping) he takes a privateer to sea in July 1812 after war is formally declared. Details of sail handling and such are held to a minimum, and much of the story takes place on land. He becomes enamored with the young wife of an older English landowner, Sir Arthur Ransome, first meeting her before the war, then again aboard a ship he captures.

After various adventures he is captured and imprisoned at Dartmoor along with his crew. A major part of the novel is concerned with Dartmoor prison commanded by the evil Royal Navy Captain Shortland. The prison was par for the course for that time period. Similar conditions were found in both Union and Confederate prisons during the American Civil War 50 years later. Deaths from disease were common in active Army and Navy forces, usually higher numbers than battle deaths, and deaths in prisons were undoubtedly higher (smallpox, typhus, etc.). The novel describes the deliberate massacre of American POWs three months after the war ended.

Captain Nason, of course, survives (narrators usually survive), meets the woman again, etc.

Lively Lady's protagonist is the son of two of the main characters in the earlier Arundel books: Arundel and Rabble at Arms. While not as epic as either of its precursors, Lively Lady illuminates a little-known episode of this country's history, when our war against Britain in 1812 (in effect a side-action of the Napoleonic Wars) was conducted at sea largely by private vessels licensed by our fledgling government to attack, capture, and destroy Britain's ocean-going commerce.

Roberts can come across as a bit stodgy and old-fashioned--and certainly not "politically correct"--to modern readers, but if you make allowances for his writing reflecting his times, you'll be richly rewarded with fascinating details and great storytelling.

At slighly more than 200 pages, *Captain Caution* may be Roberts' shortest novel after *Boon Island*. Its historical context- privateering during the War of 1812- makes it very similar to *The Lively Lady*, which I consider a superior novel for its handling of the love story and its potent evocation of Dartmoor Prison. However, a more discriminating reader will probably admit, with Booth Tarkington (Roberts's closest friend) that it is "about an entirely different sort of privateering, and about a phase of war imprisonment wholly unlike the sorry interlude of Dartmoor."

The plot is rather simple: returning from Canton and unaware that war has started between America and Britain, the merchant barque *Olive Branch* from Maine is captured by a British ship and its crew sent to Europe. Among them is the hero, Daniel Marvin, a.k.a. Captain Caution, and the Captain's daughter, strong-minded but easily blinded Corunna Dorman, whose budding attraction to Daniel appears to be crushed by her holding him responsible for her father's death during the capture. As always in Roberts' novels, the two lovers are separated by external forces and the book is basically a story of the hero's undaunted efforts to regain his dulcinea.

*Captain Caution* was a tough sell for Kenneth Roberts, and for the right reasons, I think. Carl Brandt (who must have been Roberts' agent) said that "the absence of the heroine for such a long period... would make monthly magazines reluctant to use it." And reluctant they were. As Roberts noted in his diary on October 25, 1932, "*Captain Caution* has now been to every slick magazine in the United States, and has been unhesitatingly rejected by all of them". Even the editor of *Adventure*, a magazine which Roberts said did not "pay much" and was therefore a "last resort", commented that "slackening of interest in the principal characters had killed all possibility of making *Captain Caution* into a serial".

Indeed, the main characters are much less endearing than Roberts' other creations. Daniel Marvin is first shown as a rather powerless victim and only begins to show the resourcefulness and endurance of the typical Robertsian hero much later into the book. As he puts it himself, "I've always looked for easier ways to do things, and almost always there's an easier way. It appears to me most people make things as hard for themselves as they can." His inventiveness, in the course of the novel, leads him to come up with modern boxing, the gangway pendulum and a winning formula for roulette (in whose efficacy Roberts, who was later completely duped by dowsing, may well have believed.)

For all this deluge of creativity, however, Roberts fails to give Marvin the enduring personality traits of the other fictional natives of Arundel he so lovingly protrayed. As for the love interest, Corunna Dorman, she is so deluded about both the hero and the scheming villain, Slade the slaver, and is so consistently wrong and angry, that her redemption falls rather flat.

In fact, I really thought that she would be another red herring, like Mary Mallinson in *Arundel*, while the much more lively niece of Talleyrand's would turn out to be the novel's Phoebe Nason (I consider the scenes between her and Marvin as really the most delightful of the whole work.) I found the combination of youthful naiveté and deep wisdom in her character really brilliant, and her advice to Marvin priceless: "You are doomed to be an unhappy young man if you think that no woman is a good woman unless she has made no mistakes and had no desires, ever; and in case you wish that sort of good woman, you must be careful to marry a plaster saint out of a church."

It does seem as though Roberts was more inspired by his minor characters than by his protagonists this time: Lucien Argandeau, the bragging, loquacious French privateer and ladies' man, ranks among Roberts' best drawn supporting characters, up there with Cap' Huff and King Dick.

*Captain Caution* also lacks the historical texture of Roberts' longer pieces of fiction, and feels more like a Patrick O'Brian novel, focusing on plot and dialogue rather than on immersing the reader in the period by richly detailed descriptions (indeed, O'Brian may have been inspired by this novel: at one point, Marvin escapes capture by pretending he has cholera aboard, a trick which Maturin uses in *Master and Commander* with the same effect.) In other words, if you want painlessly to absorb the equivalent of a dozen historical volumes, you would be better off with *Lydia Bailey* or *Rabble in Arms*.

This said, *Captain Caution* is a rather enjoyable book, though definitely of a lighter sort than the rest of Roberts' fiction.

Keneth Roberts wrote many great novels and Captain Caution is another fine example of his descriptive narrative style. You find yourself engrossed in the lives of the main characters from the battles at sea to the horrible living conditions upon the prision ships in England. There are twists and turns that will suprise you. Only Roberts could make history so vivid.

Very well written chronicle of our turbulent beginning. I highly recommend for readers of all ages.

Victorians are experiencing something of a comeback after decades of censure as the strange, repressed, half-crazy relatives we don't want to tell anyone about. We are discovering that the Victorians were not so different from us.

The Victorians did, however, produce their own brand of eccentricity and none are as delightfully eccentric as the Victorian/Edwardian writers for children discussed in Inventing Wonderland. Jackie Wullschlager starts with that greatest of all Wonderland writers, the master himself Lewis Carroll and ends with Jazz Age Pooh creator A.A. Milne.

The eccentricity of these Victorian writers is their confident, and sometimes troubling, obsession with childhood itself. Wullschlager assures us, correctly, that these writers' obsessions did not cross the line into pedophilic behavior. To 21st century sensibilities this seems scarcely creditable, especially after reading letters by Lewis Carroll to various girl children. Carroll, Lear, Barrie and Grahame's effusions about childhood can only be understood within the context of the Victorian age, the age that produced and adored Wordsworth's overly quoted (then and now) "But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home" (Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood).

Wullschlager is, I think, a bit too dismissive of Milne, who is regarded in the text as a has-been, clinging to the last remnants of the Victorian celebration of childhood. Wullschlager's overall point in this regard, however, is well made. The Victorians invented and took seriously the concept of childhood as a wonderland. Consequently, they produced children's writers of a truly magnificent stature. When the concept of childhood=innocence & pleasure was abandoned, in the early 20th century (thank you, Freud!), the result was an almost tongue-in-cheek parody of the earlier writers. It just wasn't possible to take childhood that seriously anymore.

Writers for children have of course continued to produce masterpieces, largely in the fantasy area, but that particular brand of unself-conscious Victorian nonsense and idyllicism may be lost forever. The Victorians are not as strange to us as we may like to believe, but they are certainly unreproducable.

Recommendation: Interesting, well-written, well-paced. Not the most complete biographical sketches but a complete analysis of biography and art. Give it a try.

The author relies on Austin's newspaper (no longer in print) called the Reese River Reveille to describe what every day life in Austin was like, from its founding in the 1860s to about the 1950s. Most of the book focuses on the 1860s, when Austin was founded as a mining town. The book then discusses its growth and development, the struggles of its inhabitants in an isolated location, and the hopes for Austin's own "place in the sun" as a premier western town.

The book is easy to read and very enjoyable. Having spent about a month in Austin this summer, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book in my college's library. Recommended for anyone interested in frontier history.