History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
On a visit to England in 1782, young German author Karl Philipp Moritz was very excited about riding on an English stage.
In 1782 young German writer Karl Philipp Moritz took a vacation in England. He had certainly earned it. Moritz had worked his way out of hardship by repeatedly reinventing himself as a hatter, a poet, a journalist, a theologian and most recently as a teacher. Later, he would become a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Here he describes a trip to Richmond, on the way to Derbyshire.
A contributor to the ‘Annual Review’ shared a flurry of facts about the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway, showing what a blessing it already was.
In 1832, The Annual Register carried a short notice of the benefits that had accrued from the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in September 1830. It showed in dramatic but plain figures how the scheme’s investors had done very well not only for themselves but for everyone else too.
When Robert Southey called for a fairer and greener economy, Thomas Macaulay warned that only politicians and bureaucrats would thank him.
There is nothing new in calling for high taxes to subsidise a fairer, greener economy. Poet Robert Southey did it in 1829, dreaming of a de-industrialised England of apple-cheeked labourers, charming cottages and smiling prosperity. Macaulay dubbed it ‘rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steam-engines and independence,’ and reminded him what State-funded projects too often look like.
An unemployed French labourer was amazed when a friend suggested becoming a French master to refined English ladies.
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859, 1866) was a book suited to a time of social change. For centuries, the elite had dictated a man’s trade and harvested most of the fruits of his labour, but the Industrial Revolution was changing all that. Smiles gave an example of just what was now possible in a free country.
When Lili Dehn was bundled out of the Alexander Palace in the Spring of 1917, Empress Alix reassured her that they would meet again.
Lili Dehn was a close friend of Empress Alexandra, Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter and consort of Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire. In March 1917, the new Communist powers forced the Emperor to abdicate and confined Lili and the royal family to the Alexander Palace. It was not long before Alexander Kerensky of the ‘Provisional Government’ ordered Lili and Alix’s disabled friend Anna to leave.
As a young prince Henry V was ‘fierce and of wanton courage,’ Thomas Elyot tells us, but there was one man with courage to match his.
Young prince Henry, son of King Henry IV of England, won himself a reputation as an irresponsible tearaway. It was this that led his counterpart in France, the Dauphin, to underestimate him; had the Dauphin heard this tale, first told by Tudor diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot, surely he would have thought twice before despatching that infamous box of tennis balls on Henry’s accession in 1413.