Author: Henry Frith

A Dublin man born in 1840, Henry Frith held a post at the War Office until 1875 and then wrote full time, producing close to two hundred books. English readers of Jules Verne met him without knowing it: his rendering of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is rated among the better Victorian versions, and he also translated Alphonse Daudet and Alexandre Dumas. His own range ran wide. The Biography of a Locomotive Engine, issued by Cassell in 1891, follows a railway engine from the foundry to the scrap heap for young readers. The Romance of Engineering, first published in 1892, is laid out as highway, waterway, railway and subway, with chapters on bridges, canals, the Liverpool and Manchester line and old tunnels. Ascents and Adventures collects mountaineering feats from every quarter of the globe. How to Read Character in Features, Forms, and Faces, also 1891, is a guide to physiognomy, the reading of a person's nature from the shape of head and face, and he wrote companion manuals on palmistry and on handwriting. That side of his work rested on a parlour enthusiasm with no scientific standing.