The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
‘Alpha of the Plough’ hoped Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not treat his old friends as he treated his favourite books.
As a rule, people who write well are also well-read, but it should not be supposed that they keep up with everything new that hits the shelves or receives breathless praise in the press. Alfred Gardiner, columnist for the Star, was like many professional writers suspicious of new titles, and preferred the company of characters he had come to know well.
In eighteenth-century England, the death penalty was the solution to almost any crime.
In Georgian England, the consensus was that the key to crime prevention was to dangle the hangman’s rope before every would-be criminal’s eyes. Whether he was guilty of shoplifting or murder most foul, the hangman awaited him. Yet to some at the Old Bailey the news that they wouldn’t be up on a hanging charge came as a disappointment, as George Wrong explains.
Anne Thackeray saw something satisfying in the self-control of Anne Elliot.
Anne Thackeray wondered if the novelists of her own generation (she singled out George Eliot) were bathing the reader in a little too much emotion. Austen’s heroines did not share so intimately, or express so freely, but she had studied their characters more closely. Such a one was Anne Elliot, of Persuasion.
The beginning of Robert Southey’s classic fairy tale.
The story of the Three Bears is a classic children’s tale from 1837 that first appeared in The Doctor, a seven-volume miscellany by Robert Southey published in 1834-47. In his original, there was no naughty, flaxen-haired Goldilocks, just a spiteful old woman. What follows is the beginning of Southey’s story.
A Russian princess admitted defeat with a most gracious compliment.
John Smeaton (1724-1792) was an English engineer who made advances in water and steam power, and engineered bridges, canals, harbours and land drainage schemes. Such was his reputation that Empress Catherine of Russia, who had a high regard for English know-how, dangled the lure of her glittering Court and immense treasury in the hope of landing him.
Edith Nesbit brings down the curtain on ‘The Railway Children’.
Most novelists agonise over their opening line. Edith Nesbit’s opener for The Railway Children (1905) wasn’t bad, but her final page takes the breath away. You will recall that three suburban children have moved with their mother to a small cottage near a railway line, after some men took their well-to-do father away one night in a most cloak-and-dagger fashion.