Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Norman Leys complained that policymakers in Africa were interested more in training loyal and industrious workers than in nurturing free peoples.
In 1924, Dr Norman Leys (1875-1944) recorded his alarm at the direction that schools were taking in Kenya (then part of British East Africa), where chiefs’ sons were being indoctrinated for colonial government and everyone else trained for maximum productivity. But an Englishman’s prized liberties, he said, had not come from toiling in the State’s anthills; they had come from wandering in the fields of great literature.
Diplomat William Eton warns his fellow Englishmen that shutting down debate does not make for a more united society.
In 1798, diplomat William Eton published some observations on life in the Ottoman Empire. He warned readers back home that no society can be made harmonious by silencing dissenting voices; in such societies loneliness, drug abuse and distrust spiral out of control, sneering passes for debate, and only fashionably coarse comedians are allowed to raise a laugh.
The offices of the Cheeryble Brothers are humming with excitement over two upcoming weddings, and Tim Linkinwater finds the mood is catching.
Towards the close of Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ young Frank Cheeryble has proposed to Kate Nickleby, and Kate’s brother Nicholas has proposed to Madeleine Bray. The atmosphere in the offices of the Cheeryble Brothers in London is heady with romance; and that old lion Tim Linkinwater, the company clerk, admits to Miss La Creevy, ‘a young lady of fifty,’ that the mood is infectious.
William Jerrold saw the new-fangled sewing machine as an opportunity to get women into the professions — but time was of the essence.
By 1854, the recently invented sewing machine was turning out so much work that the demand for seamstresses was falling off. Sewing had long been a poorly paid but reliable backup for single women fallen on hard times, so journalist William Blanchard Jerrold demanded assurances that Victorian society would allow these women the same job opportunities allowed to men.
In 1798, ‘Plays on the Passions’ appeared in London bookstores, but no one seemed to know who had written them.
In 1798, a volume of three dramas appeared in the English press, under the title of ‘Plays on the Passions.’ The passions were love and hatred, and the dramas were ‘Basil’, ‘The Trial’ and ‘De Monfort.’ They were warmly received but they were also anonymous, and the country’s literary men and women were beside themselves to know who had written them.
William Cowper’s peace was shattered by the arrival of a Parliamentary candidate doorstepping his Buckinghamshire constituents.
In December 1783, after losing the American colonies to independence, King George III sacked the Government and appointed 24-year-old William Pitt as Prime Minister; on March 25th, a Parliament in uproar was dissolved in readiness for a general election. Just days later, William Grenville MP came calling on William Cowper — somewhat uncomfortably, as Grenville supported Pitt and Cowper did not.