Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Mr Snawley has two stepsons he would like to offload, and Mr Squeers seems just the right person to help him.
Mr Wackford Squeers, headmaster of Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, is in London looking for clients. He is approached at the Saracen’s Head by a Mr Snawley, step-father to two small boys, who is looking for a cheap, far-off boarding school with none of those ill-judged holidays ‘that unsettle children’s minds so’.
If Britain is a chessboard, then politicians should remember that the ‘pieces’ are alive, and they generally play a better game.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith has been discussing how the character of individuals may affect the happiness of wider society. He sets up a contrast between ‘the man of humanity and benevolence’, who respects others and tries to improve society by persuasion, and ‘the man of system’, who reaches out to move people and peoples around as if they were just pawns on a chessboard.
Kate Nickleby must bite her lip as she experiences snobbery for the first time.
After falling on hard times, Kate Nickleby, daughter of a country gentleman, has gratefully accepted a job in a dressmaker’s. But a mother and daughter have come in, and being in an ill temper have chosen to take it out on the new assistant.
Harriet Smith’s school gave her a grounding in good sense that even Emma Woodhouse could not quite overthrow.
‘Emma’, like Jane Austen’s other novels, is essentially about the effects of bad education, that is, an upbringing from which good role-models have been absent, and in which theory is an accepted substitute for results. Here, she describes Harriet Smith’s school - the one she attended before ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ Emma Woodhouse tried to improve her.