25 October 27
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, An Englishman in Exile. It comes from a letter written in July 1817 by firebrand radical William Cobbett, now living in exile in the USA, to his legion of supporters back home. With characteristic directness, Cobbett faces up to his divided loyalties, and sets out clearly what he owes to the Government and people of the United States, and what he owes to the country of his birth.
The passage is only the more relavant today as war, economic insecurity and political repression force millions of people to migrate. What does the migrant owe to his adopted country? What does he do if the interests of the country of his birth clash with those of his new home, even to the point of war? Cobbett met these difficult questions head on.
26 October 26
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Jenny Kissed Me. It is a very short poem by Victorian essayist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), which at one time was a popular choice for practice in elocution.
JENNY kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in;
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
27 October 22
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Dog and Ducking. This is a brief anecdote about a Newfoundland dog, from a collection of doggy tales by Edward Jesse (1780-1868) entitled Anecdotes of Dogs (1846).
By profession Jesse was a surveyor for the Office of Works, created in 1378 to take care of royal residences. It was in this capacity that Jesse oversaw the restoration of Hampton Court Palace, which since the death of George II in 1760 had not been used as a royal residence, and made it ready to be opened to the public in 1838. Jesse was also a naturalist, who published Gleanings in Natural History (1832-1835), An Angler’s Rambles (1836) and Lectures on Natural History (1863) as well as several articles for the magazine Once a Week, chiefly on the habits of animals.
28 October 22
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, A Well-Tuned Heart.
It is an anecdote from a biography of George Herbert written by Izaak Walton, who is better known today for his Compleat Angler (1653), a classic of English literature. George Herbert (1593-1633) was a Welshman, well-connected and educated as a gentleman, who surprised many of his friends by taking orders, and in 1630 surprised them even more by accepting a post as a country clergyman in the obscure parish of Bemerton near Salisbury. He appears to have devoted himself selflessly to his parishioners and to have been much loved in return, but after barely three years Herbert died. He left behind a large body of poetry and prose of enduring popularity.
The title of this extract comes from Ye holy angels bright, a hymn written in 1681 by Richard Baxter (1615-1691).
My soul, bear thou thy part,
Triumph in God above,
And with a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love.
29 October 21
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, On Having the Socks.
This is a passage from Erewhon (1872), Samuel Butler’s instant bestseller telling of a strange, hidden land and its people much in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Both tales are satires on English society in their author’s day, and both worlds have aspects of utopia and dystopia.
In this extract, the subject is crime and sickness. The Government in Erewhon, we gather, ruthlessly prosecuted the sick, the jobless and the depressed, as harmful to society, but treated thieves, robbers and conmen with sympathy, as the victims of forces beyond their control. Butler’s tale is perhaps better known today for the chapter in which he imagined that dumb machines might one day evolve into thinking machines by a process akin to Natural Selection. That was whimsy too, but in both instances the whimsy is beginning to look more like prophecy.
Erewhon made Butler’s name, but he was never able to recapture its popularity in his later work. He himself believed that the sequel, Erewhon Revisited, was a superior piece of writing but he acknowledged that it had not been a great success. One thing we do learn from it, however, is that the narrator of Erewhon, who in that tale is not named, should be called Higgs.
Erewhon, Butler tells us, should be pronounced as three short syllables, e-re-won. It is an anagram of ‘nowhere’.
30 October 20
I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Cat and Cook, a fable by Russian fabulist Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (1769-1844).
Krylov found his true calling when he was forty. In 1809, he published a collection of fables which at once captured the Russian public’s imagination. More fables followed, and he became something of a celebrity. He was friendly with Emperor Nicholas I, and was one of a handful of literary figures honoured with a place on the Millennium of Russia monument in Veliky Novgorod, unveiled on September 8th, 1862.
The translator, Englishman (John) Henry Harrison (1829-1900), was an English teacher living in St Petersburg. He admired Krylov’s “ardent patriotism, his sound judgment, his fearless exposure of all abuses, and his sympathy, though belonging, by his education and literary connections, to what may be called ‘the old school’, with all really great reforms; witness his advocacy of the rights of the serfs.” Harrison was also something of a conservative, who denounced Tolstoy as ‘a dangerous and revolutionary socialist whose theories were anti-religious’. He protested loudly when British-American actor Ira Aldridge brought The Merchant of Venice to St Petersburg and, in addition to littering his speeches with German words and breaking up Shakespeare’s carefully crafted speech-rhythms with emotional pauses and histrionic gestures, dropped the whole of the fifth act. “His Shylock is just a vulgar moneylender,” grumbled Harrison, though the St Petersburg intelligentsia was charmed by Aldridge, who was indeed most gracious, “not the person represented by Shakespeare as persecuted by Christianity”. It is easy to see why Krylov, as a patriotic reformer with a strong sense of Russia’s heritage, so appealed to him.
The fable of the Cat and the Cook dates from 1812.
Acknowledgements to ‘Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867’ (2015) by Bernth Lindfors.