I. Zangwill's Cheating the Gallows opens as a comic study in doubles, where the shabby, easygoing Tom Peters and the polished bank manager Everard G. Roxdal share a lodging and seem to balance one another's extremes. Their odd domestic harmony deepens when Clara Newell enters the picture, moving from wary engagement to uneasy attraction as Tom's warmth, Roxdal's propriety, and Polly's flirtations expose a world of charm, secrecy, and moral slipperiness. But the easy social comedy darkens into scandal when Roxdal disappears with a large sum of bank money, leaving behind a cryptic letter, a trail of false leads, and a mystery that turns suspicion toward Tom. As Clara's loyalty gives way to dread, a nightmare, a police search, and a sensational trial seem to confirm Tom's guilt, ending in his condemnation and hanging. Then comes the devastating confession: Tom and Roxdal were the same man, a master of disguise who engineered an elaborate double life to evade suspicion after a bank robbery. In a striking contrast, the wartime memoir of Serbia and the Russo-Turkish front celebrates Andreas, an infuriating but indispensable aide whose courage, improvisation, and loyalty repeatedly save the narrator amid the chaos of war. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Various

Various is not a single author but a collective credit attached to a lively periodical culture of the late nineteenth century, when magazines were shaped by editors, contributors, illustrators, and the changing tastes of a broad reading public. Associated here with the illustrated monthly edited by Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr, this kind of publication reflects a moment when literature, humor, essays, sketches, and visual art met on the page in a form designed to entertain as well as provoke thought. Its importance lies less in one individual voice than in the shared energy of a literary marketplace that helped define modern magazine writing: witty, accessible, socially observant, and keenly attuned to the rhythms of everyday life. The themes surrounding such work include leisure, class, urban experience, satire, and the tension between seriousness and amusement, all of which still feel familiar today in our own media-saturated world. For modern readers, this legacy matters because it shows how collaborative print culture can capture a whole era’s sensibilities while remaining fresh, readable, and surprisingly current. Readers who enjoy Victorian humor, periodical history, cultural snapshots, and the pleasures of varied short-form writing are likely to find this material especially rewarding.