Extracts from Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Fiction’
A dinner host enthralls his guests with an extraordinary scientific experiment.
HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) opens with ‘the Time Traveller’ holding forth over the dinner table on the subject of Time as the fourth dimension, and the possibility of time travel. His guests are reluctant to follow where he leads, so he runs to his workshop and returns with a tiny, intricate mechanism in brass and ivory.
John Clayton, a British colonial official lost in the African jungle, is caught unawares by Kerchak, the gorilla.
In 1888 (so begins Tarzan of the Apes) colonial official John Clayton and his pregnant wife Alice took ship for west Africa, only to be put ashore in the uncharted jungle by mutineers. For a year after baby John was born, his father defied repeated attacks upon the family’s rough hut by a troop of gorillas. But last night Alice died; and this morning her grieving husband was caught unready.
Gabriel Betteredge’s cottage was cosy, his employment rewarding and his status respectable, but his cup of happiness was not quite full.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a detective story (arguably the first) about a mysterious gem, told in the form of a series of narratives by different writers. One of these is Gabriel Betteredge, who digresses into a reminiscence about his bachelor days and how he met his future wife. At the time, he had just found a very comfortable position as bailiff to Sir John and Lady Julia Verinder.
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.