The Prisoner of Zenda was Hopeâs most famous novel and achieved instant success. What follows is a tale of bravery, sacrifice and love, filled with romance and feats of derring-do that still stands the test of time. But when the king is drugged and abducted on the eve of this ceremony, young Rassendyll is convinced to take his place to try and save the day.īut things donât go as planned as the conspirators fail to reckon with the kingâs brother, the dastardly Duke of Strelsau or his fiancée, the beautiful Princess Flavia. Labeled a neâer-do-well by his sister-in-law, young Rudolph determines to escape his family and secretly travel to Ruritania for the coronation of his distant relative. It tells the story of Rudolph Rassendyll, who is, because of past indiscretions in the family and unbeknownst to him, the near twin of King Rudolph V of Ruritania. The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope is an adventure novel first published in 1894 that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Ruritania. Standard Ebooksĥ4,799 words (3 hours 20 minutes) with a reading ease of 81.63 (easy)
See the entire post for many images.The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope - Free ebook download - Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover. ^ Dead Fandoms, Part 3, Archived version, date is unclear, likely 2017.If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.” Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller. Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues.