1 November 5 Tuesday
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, A Great Writer.
In August 1880, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was finishing his novel The Brothers Karamázov at his dacha (summer retreat) in the spa town of Staraya Russa, a few miles from Veliky Novogorod in northwest Russia. He found the time to respond to a letter from Nikolai Osmidov, who had asked him what reading he would recommend for Osmidov’s twelve-year-old-daughter, and the first novelist that Dostoevsky named was none other that Scotland’s own Sir Walter Scott.
2 November 5 Tuesday
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Believe Me.
The people who wrote to Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) frequently asked him difficult questions. In 1878, one mother wrote to him asking how best to bring up her son, so that he understood good and evil. Dostoevsky was overwhelmed by the task she set for him, but he rose to it and replied with a letter of real sensitivity and common sense. His counsel could be summed up in the words of English statesman Edmund Burke, in his Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796): “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other”.
3 November 4 Monday
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Truth Lies Open to All. It comes from a collection of playwright Ben Jonson’s thoughts published in 1641, shortly after his death, called Timber: or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter.
Literary critics in the days of James I and his son Charles I were divided over just how strictly, if at all, the principles of drama laid down by classical Greek philosophers such as Aristotle should be adhered to. Some allowed no deviation; the ancients had filed their claim to the truth and nobody may trespass on their domain. Others were pleased to treat the ancients with undisguised scorn, then claim their own title to truth and put up their own No Trespassing notices. Jonson, being a man of very considerable good sense, took a middle course. Nobody owns the truth: it is not private land, he said, but open to all, man and goose, like the village green. It just needs a little clearing.
4 November 2 Saturday
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, One More Pounce. It is a scene from the life of Dorset-born highwayman Tom Dorbel (?-1714). Tom’s reckless career was told for us by Captain Charles Johnson (widely thought to be a pseudonym) in one of his series of books on sensational criminals of the early eighteenth century.
This particular story presented a problem, in that it involves a Welshman and Johnson attempted to give us his lines in dialect. The result was both grating and difficult to understand, so I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing the story, preserving the flavour of Johnson’s original as best I could.
As described by Johnson, Dorbel was violent, cunning and thoroughly unrepentant, not one of those gentlemanly highwaymen such as we met in A Corant On the Heath, so it is gratifying to see him get his comeuppance.
5 October 31
What to Get the King Who Has Everything
I recently added this post, What to Get the King Who Has Everything.
In 1615, King James I sent an ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jehangir. The recently-founded East India Company asked for ‘a mere merchant’ as being less expensive to maintain than some courtier, but the King chose Sir Thomas Roe. “He was a stiff-necked Englishman” wrote H. E. Marshall, “with a very good idea of the importance of his King and of himself. He was quite willing to be as polite and as courteous to the Great Mogul as he would have been to a European prince, but no more.”
This meant that Roe treated Jehangir with an equal regard that the Khan, who was himself a man of remarkably serious mind, did not quite expect. Roe did not bow and scrape before him, and he did not present him with chests of jewels. He gave him a modern carriage, a dress sword, and a concert of English keyboard music. Roe’s letter to the Company, written from Ajmer on January 25th, 1616, tells how Jehangir reacted to these culturally serious gifts.
6 October 31
The Greatest Mart Town of all Muscovy
I recently added this post, The Greatest Mart Town of all Muscovy.
Veliky Novgorod, in northwest Russia, is something of a favourite on Clay Lane because of its historic connections with the English and its beautiful, largely unspoilt Mediaeval walled kremlin (citadel). Together with Kiev, it is one of the two mother-cities of all Russia: see Invitation to a Viking. In the sixteenth century, it was also larger and more prosperous than the capital, Moscow, thanks to its position at the eastern end of the Hanseatic League, a club of merchant cities that stretched at one time to London.
Those days, however, were gone. London had found the League to be An Odious Monopoly, and the League regarded the English merchants who defied them in the Baltic as pirates. Imagine, then, the irritation of the merchants of Flanders on a visit to Novgorod in 1553, hoping to persuade the Novgorodians to restore their trade privileges after a falling-out, when they bumped into Sir Richard Chancellor and his party of Englishmen.