Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
The great French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte protested that in calling England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ he had paid us a compliment.
‘The English are a nation of shopkeepers’ intoned Napoleon Bonaparte, offending many English politicians including Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822. But as the great General, by now exiled on the island of St Helena, told his personal physician Dr O’Meara, he had meant it as a compliment. The English, he said, should stop trying to be French.
After a visit to England in 1847, Aleksey Khomyakov published his impressions of our country and our people in a Moscow magazine.
Russian landowner Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860) paid a visit to England in 1847. He subsequently sent a letter to a Moscow journal in which he relayed his impressions of England and the English, at a time when relations between the two countries were strained over Afghanistan and Turkey. In 1895, John Birkbeck summarised Khomyakov’s commentary for those who knew no Russian.
On realising that he had the edge on his rivals, music publisher John Brand moved quickly to secure one of Haydn’s peerless Quartets.
A contributor calling himself ‘A Constant Reader’ submitted this story to the Musical World in 1836. He declared that he could vouch for the truth of it, as he had heard it from ‘the originator,’ music publisher John Bland (1750-1840), who was still alive at the time and in a position to refute it. He never did, and the story found its way into Carl Ferdinand Pohl’s influential biography and thence into musical folkore.
Agricola, tasked with subduing the people of Britain to Roman colonial government, persuaded them to wear servitude as a badge of refinement.
Gnaeus Julius Agricola took over as Roman Governor of Britannia in 78, and remained there for six very successful years. Having applied the stick, so his son-in-law Cornelius Tacitus tells us, he was eager to offer carrots: taxes were cut, corrupt officials were weeded out, and investment was poured in. The coddled and cozened tribal leaders thought they had got a fine bargain for their liberties.
Piqued by the way French and German literati mocked the English, Charles Dickens urged his compatriots to be the better men.
A production of The Benefit Night at the Carl Theatre in Vienna in March 1850 introduced the character of Lord Pudding, ‘a travelling Englishman.’ His clownish antics stung Charles Dickens into protesting at the stereotypes perpetuated by Continental writers, yet he did not demand punishment. He urged the English to hop on a train, and spread a little entente cordiale.
Shortly after meeting Fanny Osbourne, Robert Louis Stevenson reflected on the different ways in which falling in love affects a man.
In 1876, Robert Louis Stevenson, who was in France for his health, met Fanny Osbourne, an American who was estranged from her serially unfaithful husband, and supporting herself and her two children by writing. For much of the following year Robert remained in France with Fanny, Isobel and Lloyd, and in 1877 published an essay titled ‘On Falling in Love’ in The Cornhill Magazine.