Driven Back to Eden

First serialized in the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas, Driven Back to Eden is a classic of the 19th-century "back-to-the-land" genre. In the preface, author Edward Payson Roe explains that he intended to write a realistic story that could serve as a practical and encouraging guide for families wishing to escape urban tenements for a healthier, more wholesome life in the country. For Robert Durham, a bookkeeper earning a modest salary, life in his crowded New York City flat has become an unsolvable problem. He sees his wife growing nervous and weary, his frail daughter Mousie fading in the city air, and his other children being drawn into the street's unhealthy influences. After the events of a particular evening confirm his fears, he makes a momentous decision: the family must abandon the city and learn to make their living from the soil, despite their inexperience. The novel blends a heartwarming family adventure with detailed instructions on the challenges and rewards of small-scale farming, from planting the first crops to managing difficult neighbors. Perfect for readers who love heartwarming stories of family resilience and the timeless dream of simpler living! This inspiring tale of the Durham family's journey from cramped city quarters to country freedom offers both practical wisdom and genuine hope for anyone yearning to escape urban pressures for a more meaningful life close to the land. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)