Biographical Extracts
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Biographical Extracts’
Dr Johnson’s cat left James Boswell cold, but the great man himself would do anything to avoid hurting the little fellow’s feelings.
Dr Samuel Johnson has a reputation today as a master of put-downs and unkind cracks, but his private prayers and various passages from James Boswell’s biography show another, much gentler side. Here, we meet Hodge, the distinguished lexicographer’s cat in the 1760s.
A doctor is wondering how to apologise for being drunk on the job, when he receives a letter from his patient.
George Fordyce (1736-1802), an eminent Scottish physician on the staff at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, did not often make house calls — not, at any rate, twice at the same address. But Samuel Rogers, a friend of Byron, recalled one occasion when luck was very much on his side.
The flamboyant English poet went to extreme lengths to get a refund on an unsatisfactory purchase.
After moving to Ravenna in 1819, poet Lord Byron bought a black horse which had a tendency to trip and throw his rider, as Byron discovered only the second time he rode him. Byron demanded his money back, and as he cheerfully confessed to Edward Trelawny, things started to get a little ugly.
Meriel Talbot’s distinguished career in government came as no surprise to those who had seen her at the wicket.
As a young woman, composer Ethel Smyth played cricket for a ladies’ team in Kent, the White Heather Club. The club’s leading light was the future Dame Meriel Talbot, who would soon play a key government role in the Commonwealth and the Great War. Though still in her early twenties, Meriel’s demeanour on and off the pitch showed she was destined for greatness.
Composer Ethel Smyth starts telling the Archbishop of Canterbury a joke, and then wishes she hadn’t...
In the late 1880s, rising composer Ethel Smyth became friendly with Nelly Benson, daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and often shared in the family’s meals. Archbishop Benson’s massive dignity never failed to disconcert Ethel, and on one occasion she started nervously babbling an anecdote about a misprint in a newspaper.
Major-General Charles Napier, given the task of policing a Chartist rally in Manchester, was alarmed to hear the protestors had brought the big guns - literally.
In 1838, the ‘Chartists’ demanded Parliamentary reforms which gained wide sympathy, especially in the industrial North West. But by the following summer violent radicals who were no friends of liberal democracy were hijacking the movement, as Major-General Charles Napier discovered for himself when keeping the peace at a rally in Manchester in May, 1839.