Excerpt from The Unclassed This book was written and sent forth a long, long time ago. Judge of its antiquity from the fact that the original publishers were afraid to think what they had done - that editors, for the most part, were unwilling to have the book noticed in their columns - and that the few readers into whose hands it fell (some of them intelligent people) drew aside to make known in whispers their condemnation or their praise. The date was 1884 - a long time ago. Nowadays, the theme and its presentment will, at worst, be "matter for a flying smile." It will be recognised as the work of a very young man, who dealt in a romantic spirit with the gloomier facts of life. Revising this early effort, the author has been glad to run his pen through superfluous pages, and to obliterate certain traces of the impertinent Ego. But the narrative remains what it was, and should be read as narrative pure and simple. Romance has no moral, and youth may be pardoned its idealism. With regard to the title, which has sometimes been misunderstood, I should like to say that by "unclassed" I meant, not, of course, declasse, nor yet a condition technically represented by the heroine. Male and female, all the prominent persons of the story dwell in a limbo external to society. They refuse the statistic badge - will not, like Bishop Blougram's respectabilities, be "classed and done with." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.