Dog and Ducking

By Edward Jesse

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.

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Proverbial Wisdom

From Think and Speak

Explain these proverbial remarks by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) to someone who has not understood them.

1 What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.

2 Damn with faint praise.

3 For forms of Government let fools contest —
Whate’er is best administered is best.

On Having the Socks

By Samuel Butler

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’.

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Cat and Cook

By Ivan Andreyevich Krylov Translated by John Henry Harrison

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.

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Acknowledgements to ‘Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867’ (2015) by Bernth Lindfors.

Crossword No. 7

From Crosswords

A new crossword for the collection.

Fill the empty boxes with letters to make words running across and down. Use the numbered clues to help you find the right words. Click any box to get started.

Reported or indirect speech is speech that is given in summary form rather than transcribed word for word and placed between quotation marks. For example, this speech from Tolstoy’s War and Peace

“I am very glad I did not go to the ambassador’s,” said Prince Hippolyte “— so dull.”

may be reported as

Prince Hippolyte said that he was very glad that he had not gone to the Ambassador’s, as it would have been so dull.

Read this exchange from the same novel:

See if you can report the substance of the conversation in the same fashion as the example above. You may wish to begin with something like

Anna asked Pierre...