Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Fiction’
The exasperated women of Athens challenge the men of the City to decide whether women are a blessing or a curse.
In the Spring of 410 BC, The Women at the Thesmophoria by Aristophanes was produced in Athens at the literary festival named the City Dionysia. The play imagined how Aristophanes’s notoriously misogynist fellow-playwright Euripides might get on at the autumn Thesmophoria, a religious celebration exclusively for women — and the Chorus of Women certainly found his attitude towards them baffling.
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.
With King John dead and the threat of invasion fading, Philip Faulconbridge reflects that the danger within is always greater than the danger without.
At the end of William Shakespeare’s play The Life and Death of King John, written in about 1594-96, the King has just died an untimely death; with him has died the threat of a French invasion, and John’s heir Henry has returned home to England to assume the crown. Henry’s cousin Philip Faulconbridge heaves a sigh of relief, and draws an optimistic moral from all that has gone before.
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.
Jack Pansay has just bought an engagement ring for the bewitching Kitty Mannering, yet to his annoyance it is the late Mrs Wessington he is thinking about.
Jack Pansay last saw Mrs Agnes Keith-Wessington here in Simla, perched in a rickshaw and weeping her eternal cuckoo cry: “Jack, darling! it’s all a mistake; do let’s be friends”; but for him their shipboard romance had long been over. Now she was dead, and April 1885 found him at Hamilton’s, buying Kitty Mannering an engagement ring, and trying to shake the feeling that someone has been calling his name.