Biographical Extracts
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Biographical Extracts’
Leopold Mozart was eager to win the hearts of the English, and thought he knew just the way to do it.
In 1763-64, Leopold Mozart spent fifteen months in England with his daughter Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’) and son Wolfgang, who turned nine during the visit. Leopold was much taken with King George III and Queen Charlotte, who treated the Mozarts like family, and he told his friend Johann Lorenz von Hagenauer, an Austrian businessman, that he was eager to win the affection of the English people too.
John, Duke of Montagu, that irrepressible prankster, identified a sad-faced soldier in the Mall as the perfect mark.
John, Duke of Montagu (1690-1749), was notorious for his practical joking. This might be little more than squirting people with water or putting itching powder in the guest bed, but sometimes it took on a grander conception.
Horace Walpole, a loyal patron of Vauxhall pleasure gardens, visits newly-opened rival Ranelagh gardens in Chelsea.
Richard, Viscount Ranelagh, opened the formal gardens of his house next to the Chelsea Hospital to the public in 1742. Horace Walpole was there the very next evening, but told his friend Horace Mann that he still preferred the older (and more rumbustious) pleasure gardens at Vauxhall.
Literary rumour in the time of Queen Anne said that William Shakespeare owed his extraordinary career to a scurrilous ballad.
The tale of how bad-boy William Shakespeare was chased out of Warwickshire for his scurrilous verses only to find immortality on the London stage is enduringly popular, though modern scholars are sceptical at best. The following account comes from Shakespeare scholar and Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718).
A benevolent lecturer has to persuade a class of restless girls to stay inside on a rainy day.
John Ruskin’s ‘Ethics of the Dust’ is a series of classroom dialogues inspired by the famous art critic’s visits to Winnington Hall, a girls’ school near Northwich in Cheshire, where he taught Scripture, geology and art, and oversaw cricket matches. Pianist Sir Charles Hallé performed for the girls too, and would surely have enjoyed Ruskin’s musical analogy.
Sir William Napier stopped to console an unhappy little girl, and made her a promise he did not find it easy to keep.
Sir William Napier (1785-1860) was a soldier and military historian, whose monumental ‘History of the Peninsular War’ helped establish the enduring reputation of Wellington, and commands respect to this day. He was also a man of honour whose word was his bond, as the following story, told by his daughter, shows.