George MacDonald

Gutta-Percha Willie, the Working Genius

First published
1873
Length
47,000 words, about 3 hours' reading

Begin reading

A doctor’s son with a gift for making and mending things.

Contents

  1. Chapter I. Who He Was and Where He Was
  2. Chapter II. Willie's Education
  3. Chapter III. He is Turned into Something He Never Was Before
  4. Chapter IV. He Serves an Apprenticeship
  5. Chapter V. He Goes to Learn a Trade
  6. Chapter VI. How Willie Learned to Read Before He Knew his Letters
  7. Chapter VII. Some Things That Came of Willie's Going to School
  8. Chapter VIII. Willie Digs and Finds What He Did Not Expect
  9. Chapter IX. A Marvel
  10. Chapter X. A New Alarum
  11. Chapter XI. Some of the Sights Willie Saw
  12. Chapter XII. A New Scheme
  13. Chapter XIII. Willie's Nest in the Ruins
  14. Chapter XIV. Willie's Grandmother
  15. Chapter XV. Hydraulics
  16. Chapter XVI. Hector Hints at a Discovery
  17. Chapter XVII. How Willie Went on
  18. Chapter XVIII. Willie's Talk with his Grandmother
  19. Chapter Xvix
  20. Chapter XX. How Willie Did his Best to Make a Bird of Agnes
  21. Chapter XXI. How Agnes Liked Being a Bird
  22. Chapter XXII. Willie's Plans Bud
  23. Chapter XXIII. Willie's Plans Blossom
  24. Chapter XXIV. Willie's Plans Bear Fruit

About this digital edition

How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected

The text is Project Gutenberg’s transcription (ebook #10093), from the public-domain printed edition, made by volunteers.

For this site it was converted to Markdown: Project Gutenberg’s header and licence, the printed page numbers, and the printed table of contents were removed, and the headings were regularised so the book divides into chapters. The words of the text are as Project Gutenberg gives them.

Arthur Hughes’s illustrations come from a scan at the Internet Archive (historyofguttape00macduoft) of the 1901 Blackie edition, which reprints the plates he drew for the first edition of 1873.