Sold out within days of publication, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was written by Charles Dickens in just six weeks in order to pay off debt. Its subject matter, as in his previous works, is motivated by Dickens' real concern for the plight of the poor, based on his own personal experience during his upbringing. He personally commissioned John Leech, chief cartoonist for Punch from 1841-1861, to produce four hand coloured etchings and four wood engravings to illustrate the tale. It was this commission, coupled with the sale price of five shillings and Dickens' insistance on high-quality end-papers and a coloured title page, that resulted in the book failing to make a profit, despite the very favourable sales.

Many contemporary and subsequent observers consider A Christmas Carol to have reawakened the importance of Christmas, as old Christmas traditions had begun to wane in early Victorian times:

A mixture of fact and fiction, Bēowulf is the oldest surviving epic poem in British literature, written in Old English sometime around the 10th Century. Bēowulf, a hero from southern Sweden, from the tribe known as Geats, travels to Denmark to help defeat Grendel, a monster who is terrorising the Danish king, Hrothgar, and his people.

This text is a revised and corrected version of James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp's fourth edition, based on the Heyne-Socin edition of Bēowulf and incorporating their notes and glossary on both Bēowulf and The Fight At Finnsburg, with corrections by Karl Hagen.

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• Perspectives - a range of concepts and approaches relating to employment relations, as well as the contexts and development of UK employment relations.
• Participants - the functions, organisation and issues facing the main participants in employment relations (employees, management, trade unions and the state).
• Processes - the various processes available to the participants in determining, conducting and regulating the employment relationship.
• Practices - the outcomes in respect of not only pay and working arrangements but also employee recognition and representation and the management of grievances, discipline and redundancy.

• Focus - provided at the start and end of each element in the form of Learning Objectives, suggested Key Issues, Summary, Further Reading and Supporting Activity.
• Flexibility – provided by links from the main text to a variety of ‘supplementary’ or ‘illustrative’ materials (in particular, case studies and country profiles), as well as links between different, but related, parts of the main text itself.

Note: This is a short demonstration version of Employment Relations, the full text of which will be available later in the year. It will give you a taste of the way in which the content of this eTextbook is structured and presented to the student, as well as an insight into the operation of the software. The content of this demonstration version is limited to the Introduction, and a number of links have been disabled.

An Act to amend the law relating to employment, to trade unions and to employment agencies and businesses. 27th July 1999.

With Explanatory Notes to Employment Relations Act 1999 (ISBN 0-10-562699-6)

An Act to consolidate enactments relating to employment rights. 22nd May 1996.

English literature spans a period of around one thousand five hundred years. The earlier half, unrivalled as a vernacular literature in its day, is almost unknown to the modern reader, and if known, only in paraphrase. Knowledge of our literature is seriously incomplete without Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon,The Wanderer and half a dozen other poems, and without King Alfred’s prose, which did as much to unify the kingdom as his victories over the Danes. The prime source for any knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England, the Chronicles, was itself groundbreaking in using the vernacular, and ought to be common knowledge. But the earliest poetry and prose is written in Old English, and the modern reader is scared off.

To get a reading knowledge of Old English does require some effort—though nothing like as much as Latin. We have a flying start. Much of what we say in English uses words either the same as or closely related to the words they used a thousand years ago. Using this book you can be reading Old English after about 40 hours of work!

Many Introductions to Old English are available, some of them excellent. David Parry found in years of experience that they are all unnecessarily difficult for the modern student who may have little time and less knowledge of grammatical terms, so he made his own Old English for Beginners. In this book grammar is not shirked, and one by-product will be to give any reader who needs it a working knowledge of the grammar of modern English, but grammar is introduced step by step in alliance with reading, and the student begins reading even before starting the grammar.

Anyone who has gone seriously through this little book will be well equipped to read further and/or to study Old English academically. Its forerunners have been proved in practice to achieve these aims.

This eTextbook incorporates Mr Parry’s own readings which are themselves a first-rate introduction to Old English, a language that needs to be heard. Annotated versions and recordings of the following Old English texts are included:

• Bede's Description of Britain (excerpts)
• “The Happy Land” from The Phoenix
• Apollonius of Tyre
• The Chronicle (excerpts)
• The Battle of Maldon
• The Dream of the Rood (excerpts)
• “Satan in Hell” from Genesis B
• The Husband's Message

Englisc copyright © 2003 The Brynmill Press Ltd