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Book of the
Month -- January 2026
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 The figure of the miser is well-known in fiction and not unknown in life. He (or sometimes she) dresses in rags, goes cold in winter, eats as little as possible of the cheapest food and cadges or scavenges anything else needed. All this, in order to accumulate money which will never be spent. Yet they presumably gain some pleasure from this wretched life, else why they endure such hardship? We can only speculate. Merryweather's short book gathers together the stories of mostly 18th Century misers. It was well-known in its day, the more so because it features in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, where Mr. Boffin buys a copy, and, since he cannot read, pays Silas Wegg to read it to him. You can find the relevant passage here. Readable and highly entertaining, it deserves to be better known. |
AboutUs
The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need. When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ." If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras, which are prime examples of this. This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading.
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