Audiobook · read by volunteers
Golden Dream
R. M. Ballantyne (1825–1894)
Read by Lee Elliott · 29 chapters · 9 h 45
About the book
News of gold in California has set a whole continent in motion. In R. M. Ballantyne's adventure novel, a young man heads west with high hopes, and the road leads to San Francisco, then to the diggings, where fortunes are made and lost in a day. Rough miners, claim jumpers, honest friends and unscrupulous rogues crowd the pages, while Ballantyne gives careful attention to the practical details: how gold is washed, how a camp is run and how the diggings work. The story is thoroughly engaging, sometimes harrowing, and always vivid. Lee Elliott reads the twenty-nine chapters with plenty of energy, and listeners may well feel the dust and the excitement of the gold fields. If you enjoy old-fashioned adventures with real detail, this one will not disappoint. It makes a long, absorbing listen.
Introduction
Robert Michael Ballantyne, who lived from 1825 to 1894, was a Scottish writer of adventure stories for young readers. As a young man he worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada, and the experience gave him material for his first books. He went on to write dozens of novels, including The Coral Island, the best known of all. He believed in researching his settings carefully, and he often visited the places he described.
The Golden Dream, published in 1861, takes as its background the California gold rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s. It belongs to the great tradition of Victorian boys' adventure fiction, and, like many books in that tradition, it combines exciting incident with moral lessons about courage, honesty and perseverance. At the same time, it offers a surprisingly detailed picture of mining life and of the social attitudes of the time, which some modern readers will find more revealing than the author may have intended.
This LibriVox recording lasts nearly ten hours and is divided into 29 chapters, all read by one volunteer, Lee Elliott. It will appeal to those who enjoy classic adventure stories, and to anyone curious about the westward rush of the nineteenth century as it was imagined by a British novelist. It is a book for a long evening, with its fires, its claims and its crowded mining camps. The detail with which Ballantyne records tools and methods gives the story the feel of a document of its times as well as a tale.
The novel also offers a record of its own time, with the attitudes of a Victorian author towards other peoples and places. Listeners should be prepared for some of these views to feel dated, but the sense of adventure and the lively descriptions keep the pages turning.
Public domain
R. M. Ballantyne died in 1894: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text