We were a little nervous to know how Lewis Hough got on writing a book with such a very different setting to his masterly "Doctor Joliffe's Boys." In fact the story opens in a boarding school (the British Public School) called Harton. This is probably meant to be a word based on "Eton" and another school that has an annual cricket match with Eton, called "Harrow". In fact there is plenty of internal evidence that it really is Eton, with the dropping of local slang terms only in use at that school.

Before I knew the story I was also nervous about the title. What could Fortune possibly have to do with the Soudan War? What actually happened was that a certain Will had been stolen by a former employe, an Egyptian, of a Dublin solicitor, together with a previous version of the Will. This had resulted in a family losing all their money, since the father had been a Partner in an Eastern Bank that foundered in the events leading up to the Soudan War.

Eventually the two Wills are tracked down, and justice done as regards the estate.

But all this is a parallel story to the description of events in the Soudan War. This is well worth reading for its own sake, especially in this day and age, when certain events seem about to repeat themselves.

Lewis Hough, an Englishman who was probably born in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century, became an expert in Sir Isaac Pitman's new invention, phonography—better known today as Pitman shorthand. He wrote a number of stories in that script which were printed as exercises for students. They were printed by lithography. He also wrote a number of boys' books which enjoyed success. Of them, most interest today is in "For Fortune and Glory: A Story of the Soudan War", whose one edition was illustrated by Walter Paget, the younger brother of Sidney Paget, the creator of the original illustrations of Sherlock Holmes for the Strand Magazine.

Since his time, he has been confused frequently with Lewis Sylvester Hough ("Paulus"), an American essayist on economics and politics, who was his contemporary.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk