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BEN-HUR A Tale of the Christ Lew Wallace William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF This Collins Classics eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008124106 Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008124113 Version: 2016-06-17 In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible. Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing. Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time. In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry. HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur, published in 1880, is one of the bestselling novels of all time. Ambitious in scale and seven years in the making, it was the result of an extraordinary personal transformation. It has even been credited with saving a nation from reckless self-destruction. But its author, Lew Wallace, was almost the last person from whom this achievement could have been expected. Restless and lacking in direction, he spent most of his life struggling against failure, searching in vain for a sense of significance. Early Years Born in Indiana in 1827, Wallace was an unremarkable middle child of a prominent politician who went on to become State Governor. Already a half-hearted student, young Lew slid further into idleness following the death of his mother in 1834. A series of schools failed to inspire him and he was packed off to seek his own fortune aged just sixteen. ‘My rating at school was the worst,’ he later wrote in his memoir; but ‘looking back to the thrashings I took … I console myself thinking of the successful lives there have been with not a jot of algebra in them.’ Wallace yearned to be elsewhere doing more exciting things. He was good at drawing and writing and he loved to have adventures outdoors. Growing up in the era of American expansion and Davy Crockett, he dreamt of life on the wild frontier; what he got was a menial job in a clerk’s office. But with the outbreak of the Mexican–American War in 1846, by which point Wallace was reluctantly studying law under his father’s guidance, he finally got his first taste of the battlefield. It was a short-lived adventure but it proved decisive: even though he had little choice but to pursue life as a respectable lawyer, setting up his own practice in 1849 and marrying in 1852, he continued to dabble in military affairs, organising and commanding the local independent militia, eagerly waiting for the next war to begin. In the Firing Line When the Civil War between the Unionist and Confederate states broke out in April 1861, Wallace abandoned everything and rushed to the Union’s front line. He didn’t just fight; he wanted to lead. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a colonel by the end of April and a brigadier general by September. In March 1862, aged just thirty-four, he became the Union Army’s youngest major general. He was good at his job in these early years of the war and he knew it, frequently indulging his fantasy of running the whole show in lengthy letters home to his wife, Susan, in which he complained of ‘mismanagement’ from above. But in April 1862, just one year into the war, a strategic error caused either by Wallace’s overconfidence or his superior’s mismanagement – the debate was never conclusively resolved – was blamed for preventable loss of life at the Battle of Shiloh. Wallace’s military career never really recovered from what he felt was his scapegoating, while the superior in question, Ulysses S. Grant, went on to become Commanding General of the Union Army and then President of the United States. Wallace spent the next few decades trying to clear his name. Bored by law, let down by the military, Wallace turned to politics when he returned from the war. In 1878 he was made Governor of New Mexico, a dangerous territory in the grip of violent outlaws – among them Billy the Kid – as well as corrupt officials. His subsequent four-year stint as US ambassador to the
