Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Mr Pickwick has embarked on a tour of Kent, and this sunny morning finds him leaning over the parapet of Rochester Bridge, deep in reflection.
Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers follows Mr Samuel Pickwick as he tours the home counties with his friends, and records his impressions for the Pickwick Club. He reached Rochester without anything worse befalling his party than Mr Winkle being challenged to a duel for an offence he could not remember giving; and thus it was that before breakfast one fine morning, Mr Pickwick stood upon the bridge surveying the castle and countryside with a contented eye.
Now that Mr Willoughby has been found, and found to be married, Elinor Dashwood has the disagreeable task of making sure that her sister feels it is all for the best.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility turns on the baffling behaviour of Mr Willoughby, who assiduously courts Marianne Dashwood only to vanish from the neighbourhood. When he is finally tracked down in London, he has married a woman of fashion and wealth, and Marianne’s sister Elinor — with every right to a resounding ‘I told you so’ — has to make sure that Marianne and their mother have both accepted the realities.
A charming children’s rhyme that is also a test of the clearest speaker’s diction.
Sir Edward Abbott Parry had recently been appointed one of her majesty Queen Victoria’s judges when he published Katawampus (1895), a book of tales and rhymes for young children. It all began, it seems, when Pater (Latin for father), in despair over his fractious children, took a Christmas Day dip in the sea... but before telling that extraordinary story, Pater gave these little verses from his ‘book of rhymes’.
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.
Economist Adam Smith warned that when Western commercial interests get involved in policy-making abroad, war and want are sure to follow.
In 1757, a Government-backed trade agency called the British East India Company achieved such commercial and military superiority in India that its board members appointed princes, conquered territories, and dictated social and economic policy. Twenty controversial years later, Scottish economist Adam Smith warned that a company set up to make profits for European clients should not and could not run India for the Indians.
Overwhelmed by a London wedding, William Marston seeks safety in the company of a children’s nurse, but safety is not what he finds.
Towards the close of Henry Kingsley’s Ravenshoe, William Marston has been invited to a double wedding, and being unmarried himself feels a little out of it. His eye lights on a children’s nurse, and gallantly he attaches himself to her only to find that in doing so he has attached himself to her three little charges too — the kind of charge that goes off with a bang.