Charles Dickens
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Charles Dickens’
Charles Dickens laments William the Conqueror’s brutal rampage through rebellious Durham and Yorkshire.
The Harrying of the North was William of Normandy’s rampage through the lands around Durham and York in the winter of 1069-70. Following victory over King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William was crowned King of England on Christmas Day that year, but the people of England, and their Viking friends in Ireland and across the North Sea, did not meekly acknowledge their new lord.
Charles Dickens tells the story of Hereward the Wake, the last Englishman to stand up to William the Conqueror.
After seizing King Harold’s crown at Hastings in 1066, William of Normandy had to face a series of challengers from among the English and their friends in Ireland and Scotland. William crushed the revolt of Harold’s sons Edmund and Godwin, visited slaughter and burning on Durham, bought off the Danes and the Earls Edwin and Morcar — and left one man to lead the rebels in a last desperate stand.
Charmed by their attentions to her daughter Kate, Mrs Nickleby rewards Mr Pyke and Mr Pluck with a reminiscence about her favourite home remedy for colds.
Last night Mrs Nickleby and her daughter Kate, fifteen, were entertained at the home of her brother-in-law Ralph. Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Frederick Verisopht were charming, and this morning Mr Pyke and Mr Pluck have been commissioned to invite mother and daughter to the theatre. Poor Mrs Nickleby has no inkling of the deal Ralph and Sir Mulberry have struck concerning Kate, and it does not involve marriage.
Lord George Gordon marched at the head of 50,000 protestors to the House of Commons, to demand that George III’s England did not become like Louis XVI’s France.
The ‘Gordon Riots’ of 1780 were a protest against the Papists Act (1778), which eased the ban on Roman Catholics in Government. Fearing the Pope would meddle in English politics as he apparently meddled all over Europe, Lord George Gordon MP led an unruly mob to the Commons with a petition for repeal. In Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens dramatised what unfolded on the stairs up to the Visitor’s Gallery.
Mr Gradgrind and a Government expert on education make sure that the children of Coketown have the right opinions about everything.
Mr Gradgrind is ready to hand Coketown’s model school over to zealous Mr M’Choakumchild, fresh from teacher-training. Present on this auspicious occasion is a gentleman from the Government, who believes that the purpose of education is to mass-produce identical batches of priggish little human vials filled to the brim with State-approved Facts, and empty of everything else.
Mr Squeers explains his educational philosophy to his new and bewildered assistant master at Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire.
Mr Squeers, owner and headmaster of Dotheboys Hall near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, has (much to the bafflement of Mrs Squeers) hired an assistant master from London, nineteen-year-old Nicholas Nickleby. The moment has now come for the new arrival to familiarise himself with a system of education designed to fit young people for the world of work — chiefly in Dotheboys Hall.