1 November 30 Saturday
I recently added this post, Unfair Competition. It is taken from The Life and Adventures of a Cat, published in 1760 by an anonymous author. Despite the title, this is not a children’s tale but a social satire on eighteenth-century England, in which the career of Tom is an excuse for the author to comment on events and figures of the day.
In this extract, Tom begins by discoursing on mousetraps, which he regards as a threat to his livelihood and an insult to his species. We hear then that he was so outraged by these infernal machines that he gathered sixty of his feline friends and took drastic action against one manufacturer of them.
Just seven years earlier, in 1753, weavers had trashed the Bury home of inventor John Kay, who had patented the flying shuttle some twenty years before. Like Tom, the hand-weavers feared for their livelihood, because Kay’s weaving machines were so productive that yarn was in short supply, and the price was going up. It was a problem that would not be resolved until James Hargreaves’s ‘spinning jenny’ mechanised the spinning of yarn in 1764. The merits of machines and their impact on workers and the economy would continue to be hotly debated for another century.
2 November 28 Thursday
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I recently added this post, Tree of Life. Taken from The Story of Canada by Edith Louise Marsh, it is an account of French explorer Jacques Cartier’s second expedition to North America, when he sailed up the St Lawrence River as far as what is now Quebec and Montreal.
Drawing on Cartier’s own records, Marsh recalled how Cartier was warmly welcomed by the native Canadian chief Donnacona, and how the Frenchman went up the mountain he christened Mont Real, the Royal Mount, and gazed out over the colours of autumn below.
A Canadian winter, however, was a shock to him and his crew. The French were stranded in Hochelaga (modern-day Montreal) and struck down by scurvy. The native Canadians came to their rescue, but then the French repaid all their kindness with an act of betrayal.
3 November 28 Thursday
I recently added this post, Invictus. It is a well-known poem by W. E. Henley (1849-1903), two of the most quotable verses in our language. From the age of twelve, Henley had been undergoing treatment for a form of tuberculosis that affected the bones of his legs. Some of this treatment was extremely painful. In 1868 surgeons were forced to take one leg below the knee.
In 1873, after doctors told Henley that they would need to take his other leg, he contacted the eminent and pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister, and entered an infirmary in Edinburgh. He remained there for some twenty months, but in 1875 he was able to leave without further amputation. It was in this year that Henley composed the poem ‘Invictus’.
4 November 25
I recently added this post, The Dilemma. Despite its Indian dress, this alternative Adam-and-Eve tale was conjured up by Englishman Francis Bain, when he was a professor of History at Deccan College in Pune. He included it at the start of his first collection of fables, A Digit of the Moon (1898), tales which he claimed to have translated from an ancient Sanskrit manuscript placed in his hands by a dying Brahman. A good many readers (including learned anthropologists) took his explanation at face value. Others were not caught out. A reviewer in The Nation for August 31st, 1905, wrote:
“Though palpably a pretence, they are graceful fancies, and might as well have appeared for what they really are instead of masquerading as ‘translations’. No Hindu, unless of this generation and under foreign influence, ever conceived these stories. They are an amalgam of delicate European thought and flowery Hindu expression. The native atmosphere has been rather cleverly caught, and the author has adopted several Hindu tricks of story-telling. His acquaintance with Hindu literature appears to be limited to a few often translated classics; but he gets the local Indian colour and has a well imitated (though considerably chastened) Hindu style. Many persons will deem his stories charming.”
5 November 24
I recently added this post, The Departure of Bede. In 735, St Bede, a monk at the monastery of St Paul in Jarrow (now a suburb of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) died, aged just over sixty. He was already famous throughout Europe for his learning in matters from astronomy to theology, and also as a man of God and a church musician. All this led the monk Cuthwine to ask Cuthbert, one of Bede’s former pupils and later Abbot of the monastery (which occupied two sites, St Paul’s in Jarrow and St Peter’s in Monkwearmouth, near modern-day Sunderland), for his recollections of Bede’s last days. This extract comes from the end of the letter Cuthbert wrote in reply.
6 November 21
I recently added this post, The New Broom. It is an extract from Guy Mannering, the second of Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Waverley’ novels, written over a mere six weeks at Abbotsford at a time when Scott was badly in need of funds, and published in 1814. The story turns on the inheritance of Harry Bertram, son of the Laird of Ellangowan in Galloway, but most critics are agreed that it is the minor characters who give the story life, above all the gypsy Meg Merrilies.
In this extract, we get to know Godfrey Bertram, Harry’s father, the easy-going and likeable laird of Ellangowan. Godfrey has had the misfortune to be appointed to the magistrates’ bench, a dignity which instantly turned his head. Seized by zeal for the law, he began a clean-up of the beggars, the work-shy and the generally untidy of Ellangowan that pleased his fellow-magistrates but did not please the locals, and did not please Scott.