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Author

G. A. Henty

1832–1902

80 fiction

G. A. Henty (1832–1902) was an English journalist, war correspondent and one of the most prolific writers of historical adventure fiction for young readers in the Victorian period. Educated at Westminster School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he left university during the Crimean War and served with the British Army’s hospital commissariat. He later became a special correspondent for The Standard, reporting from the Austro-Italian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the British expedition to Abyssinia, the Ashanti campaign and the Carlist War in Spain, as well as travelling to the opening of the Suez Canal and through India. These experiences gave him first-hand knowledge of campaigning, logistics and military life that strongly influenced his fiction. From the 1870s onwards he became extraordinarily productive, eventually writing more than a hundred books, most of them adventure stories intended for boys.

Henty’s historical novels range across an unusually broad sweep of history, normally placing a fictional young hero close to major battles and famous historical figures. The Young Carthaginian is set during the Second Punic War; The Dragon and the Raven during the Viking invasions of Anglo-Saxon England; Wulf the Saxon culminates in the Norman Conquest and Battle of Hastings; In Freedom’s Cause follows William Wallace and Robert the Bruce; St. George for England and At Agincourt explore the Hundred Years’ War; and By Pike and Dyke deals with the Dutch Revolt. His later-period adventures include The Cornet of Horse during Marlborough’s campaigns, With Clive in India during the expansion of East India Company power in eighteenth-century India, With Wolfe in Canada during the Seven Years’ War, and numerous books set during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, colonial Africa and nineteenth-century imperial campaigns.

Henty’s books remain useful examples of Victorian historical adventure, but their treatment of empire, race and Indigenous peoples often reflects the strongly imperialist assumptions of late nineteenth-century Britain and needs to be understood in that context.

Periods and events

Alfred the Great and Wessex871–899 CE American Civil War1861–1865 CE American Revolutionary War1775–1783 CE Anglo-Spanish War1585–1604 CE Anglo-Zulu War1879 Battle of Agincourt1415 CE Battle of Corunna1809-01-16 Battle of Crécy1346 CE Battle of Hastings1066 CE Battle of Omdurman1898 Battle of Poitiers1356 CE Battle of the Nile1798-08-01–1798-08-03 Battle of Trafalgar1805-10-21 Battle of Waterloo1815-06-18 Boudican Revolt60–61 CE Boxer Rebellion1899–1901 CE British Colonisation of the South Pacificlate 18th–19th centuries California Gold Rush1848–1855 CE Crimean War1853–1856 CE East India Company Ascendancy1757–1833 CE Eighty Years’ War1568–1648 CE First English Civil War1642–1646 CE First Jewish–Roman War66–73 CE Fourth Anglo-Mysore War1798–1799 French and Indian War1754–1763 CE French Invasion of Russia / Patriotic War of 18121812 CE Georgian Empire and Atlantic World1714–1837 CE Glyndŵr Rising1400–1415 CE Great Fire of London1666 CE Indian Rebellion of 18571857–1858 CE Indian Wars of the American West1850–1890 CE Italian Unification1815–1871 CE Jacobite Rising of 17451745–1746 CE Latin American History1492–1990 CE Long Nineteenth Century1789–1914 CE Medieval Venicec. 697–1500 CE Military Ordersc. 1119–1500 CE Monmouth Rebellion1685 CE New Kingdom Egyptc. 1550–1070 BCE Old West and Frontier America1803–1912 CE Peasants’ Revolt1381 CE Peninsular War1807–1814 CE Reign of Terror1793–1794 CE Rise of the Ottoman Empire1299–1453 CE Second Anglo-Afghan War1878–1880 CE Second Anglo-Maratha War1803–1805 Second Boer War1899–1902 CE Second Punic War218–201 BCE Seven Years’ War1756–1763 CE Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire1519–1521 CE St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre1572 CE Thirty Years’ War1618–1648 CE War of the Spanish Succession1701–1714 CE Wars of Scottish Independence1296–1357 CE

Historical fiction

Standalone historical fiction by G. A. Henty (80 books)

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