Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Fiction’
Edmond Holmes, a former inspector of schools, reported back to the Board of Education on a pioneering system being developed in Italy.
Edmond Holmes resigned from the Board of Education in 1911, after his trenchant critique of fellow Elementary school inspectors leaked out. He took the opportunity to visit Maria Montessori’s pioneering schools in Italy, and prepared a paper for the Board (his experience was still highly valued there) in which he urged them to lose no time in adopting her methods.
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.
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.
Will Langland tells how after the crucifixion, the soul of Christ went down to Hades to fetch Piers the Ploughman and the rest of hopeless humanity.
In William Langland’s dream-narrative ‘The Book of Piers the Ploughman’, we have seen Jesus Christ enter Jerusalem, and seen him crucified. But Lucifer and his devils are anxious. From their fastness in Hades, surrounded by the souls of the dead, they see a distant light; they double-bar the doors and plug every chink in the mortar but closer and closer it comes, until it stands before the very gates.
In ‘Do-bet,’ the sequel to his popular ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ Will Langland dreams about the trial of Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate, and what followed.
In William Langland’s dream-narrative ‘The Book of Piers the Ploughman’, we have seen Jesus Christ enter Jerusalem riding on an ass, but looking more to Will’s eyes like a knight entering the lists to joust on behalf of mankind. Now the Tournament begins in earnest, with Roman Governor Pontius Pilate sitting in the umpire’s chair.
Will Langland, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, dreams he is looking for his old friend Piers the Ploughman in Jerusalem just when Christ rides in on a donkey.
William Langland’s ‘Book of Piers the Ploughman’ is a late fourteenth-century dream sequence that tumbles together Christian reflection with social commentary much as John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ would later do. In Passus 18, Will has fallen asleep during Lent, and his dream takes him confusedly to Palm Sunday, a week before Easter.