"The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York" by Algernon Blackwood

10 months ago
133

This is just all the chapters put together into one upload. If you've been following along the whole time, there is nothing new to hear here.

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0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:34:32 Chapter 2
0:57:45 Chapter 3

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Sidebotham: this is a real English surname, but I am not sure about the pronunciation. Listening to the handful of American youtubers who actually say the name, they use the pronunciation I used, and since this story is set in the US, that's what we're going with. Sorry to any Brits in the audience who pronounce it differently...

Smith & Wesson revolver: for being no later than 1906, this would most likely be a .38 special (introduced in 1899 as the Model 10) or a Model 3 (1870). Some earlier models existed (the Model 1 from 1857 or the Volcanic from 1854), but those would be so old and obsolete by the time of the story that they seem very unlikely. Trivia fact: the Model 10 is the most produced handgun of the 20th century, and still in use today. The Model 3, on the other hand, ceased production in 1915, although that's sufficiently far after the time setting of this story that there is still a good chance the revolver in question is a Model 3. In the last chapter the author starts calling it a pistol instead, which is technically incorrect, but a common error. Ugh.

Jehu: the tenth king of the northern Kingdom of Israel since Jeroboam I, noted for exterminating the house of Ahab. Oh wait, that's not the context for this story... Here we use the definition of: a driver of a coach or cab.

Apparently King Jehu was noted in the Bible as something of a chariot driver, hence the reuse of the term later on to describe a coachman, especially one who drives very fast and/or recklessly.

A Jew named Marx? Seriously? *sigh* I get it, Karl isn't the only Jewish person in the world with the surname of Marx, but he's the one everybody immediately thinks of. By 1906, Karl's works have already had six decades to circulate, and were well known and highly influential at the time, so even then it would have been a name many people would have thought of when presented with the surname of Marx. But we see throughout the story that the author's attitudes towards Jews seems to be very typical for the time.

The pictures used are:

Chapter 1: a picture by Lindsey Lee of "Awesome hidden door/bookshelf at Vizcaya". So it's not in a Long Island manor house, but it's what I got. Used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/). I tried to find pictures from circa 1900 of lone estates on Long Island in the winter, but there's just nothing out there to that effect that I could find. Had to come up with some other idea, and this is what occurred to me.

Chapter 2: "Formal Enough" by Shapooda, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

Chapter 3: "Wolfman v Dracula" by Jay Malone, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Ok, so Garvey wasn't in werewolf form at the end, and we don't know that Marx is a vampire, but the idea of werewolf vs. vampire struck my fancy while reading this story, so nyah.

The follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14471/14471-h/14471-h.htm#chapter9

We never find out if Marx was in any way supernatural. I was half expecting him to end up being a vampire. We're never given any idea one way or the other.

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