Smith's (Wilbur's, not Ian's} grandfather, Courtney Smith had been a transport rider during the Witwatersrand gold rush in the late 1880s, had commanded a Maxim gun team during the Zulu Wars. He had also hunted elephant both as sport and to provide a lot of meat for his family. Courtney Smith had a magnificent moustache which could tell wonderful stories to his grandson about the fictitious Ballantyne family, who helped colonise Rhodesia. After that he returned to the Courtney family. For his fans had made it very clear that they would like to read his novels and revisit his family of characters faster than he could write them. After 4 wives and tons of books and bucks, Smith died unexpectedly on 13 November 2021 at his Cape Town home; he was 88.
xxx/ellauri120.html on line 46: Lytton was on the route of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858. The same year, Lytton was named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the British Colonial Secretary and a novelist. For many years Lytton was a stop on major transportation routes, namely, the River Trail from 1858, Cariboo Wagon Road in 1862, the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s, the Cariboo Highway in the 1920s, and the Trans Canada Highway in the 1950s. However, it has become much less important since the construction of the Coquihalla Highway in 1987 which uses a more direct route to the BC Interior.
xxx/ellauri129.html on line 672: William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known for The Woman in White (1859), and for The Moonstone (1868), which has been posited as the first modern English detective novel. Born to the London painter William Collins and his wife, he moved with the family to Italy when he was twelve, living there and in France for two years and learning Italian and French. He worked initially as a tea merchant. After publishing Antonina, his first novel, in 1850, Collins met Charles Dickens, who became a friend and mentor. Some Collins work first appeared in Dickens's journals Household Words and All the Year Round. They also collaborated on drama and fiction. Collins gained financial stability and an international following by the 1860s, but began to suffer from gout and became addicted to the opium he took for the pain, so that his health and writing quality declined in the 1870s and 1880s. Collins was critical of the institution of marriage: he split his time between widow Caroline Graves – living with her for most of his adult life, treating her daughter as his – and the younger Martha Rudd, by whom he had three children.
xxx/ellauri176.html on line 154: The novel was translated into English by Vizetelly & Co. in the 1880s as Abbé Mouret's Transgression, but this text must be considered faulty due to its many omissions and bowdlerisations, as well as its rendering of Zola's language in one of his most technically complex novels into a prolix and flat style of Victorian English bearing little resemblance to the original text. Two more faithful translations emerged in the 1950s and 1960s under the titles The Sinful Priest and The Sin of Father Mouret.
xxx/ellauri250.html on line 556: His father was Heinrich (Henry) Bukowski, an American of German descent who had served in the U.S. army of occupation after World War I and had remained in Germany after his army service. His mother was Katharina (née Fett). His paternal grandfather, Leonard Bukowski, had moved to the United States from Imperial Germany in the 1880s. In Cleveland, Ohio, Leonard met Emilie Krause, an ethnic German, who had emigrated from Danzig, Prussia (today Gdańsk, Poland). They married and settled in Pasadena, California, where Leonard worked as a successful carpenter. The couple had four children, including Heinrich (Henry), Charles Bukowski's father. His mother, Katharina Bukowski, was the daughter of Wilhelm Fett and Nannette Israel The name Israel is widespread among Catholics in the Eifel region. Bukowski assumed his paternal ancestor had moved from Poland to Germany around 1780, as "Bukowski" is a Polish last name. As far back as Bukowski could trace, his whole family was German.
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