The Copy Book

The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Photo by Michael D. Beckwith. Public domain image. Source
Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

February 6 January 24 OS

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This page is an index to all 1631 posts in The Copy Book.

The Copy Book is an ever-growing library of short passages from history and literature, intended for practice in paraphrase and précis or simply for reading pleasure. They include brief summaries and eyewitness accounts of major events in our national history, and extracts from fables, poetry, plays, novels, political speeches and biography. Many were included by NL Clay in his anthologies of ‘straightforward English’.

You can keep up-to-date with new posts, and discover old posts you may have missed, with the Clay Lane Blog, where you will also find a selection of word games and exercises in grammar and composition.

The posts are currently listed most recent first. Use the buttons below to sort the posts alphabetically, or shuffle the list so you can find posts from right across the collection.

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1 ★ For Today

The Last Days of Charles II

James calls Fr Huddleston to his brother’s deathbed, ready for a most delicate task.

As King, Charles II was officially the Head of the Church of England, an ever-so-modern, Protestant church. But like his father before him, and his brother James, his sympathies lay with the older Roman ways, and in 1685, lying in his bed at Whitehall Palace and facing his last hours on earth, he had an agonising decision to make.

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★ On This DayFebruary 6 ns1 post

The Death of Charles II (1685)

Picture: © Brian Robert Marshall, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

2 ★ For Today

Sir Stamford Raffles

The Founder of Singapore established his city on principles of free people and free trade.

Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is well-known to anyone who has visited Singapore, the city he founded in 1819. Still held in honour there, he is much less widely remembered back in his own country, but deserves better from us for his pioneering campaigns against slavery in the Far East and for being a champion of free trade in a world dominated by gunboat diplomacy.

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★ On This DayFebruary 6 ns2 posts

The Founding of Singapore (1819)

Picture: National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons. ? Public domain.. Source.

3 ★ For Today

The Reform Acts

Nineteenth-century Britain had busy industrial cities and a prosperous middle class, but no MPs to represent them.

The Industrial Revolution changed the face of Britain. It depopulated the countryside, spawned crowded cities, and gave real economic power to an ever-growing middle class. At last, Parliament realised that it had to represent these people to Government, and the Great Reform Act was passed.

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★ On This DayFebruary 6 ns1 post

The Representation of the People Act (1918) (1918)

Picture: © Graham Horn, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

Archive

4

Artful Lizzy Bennet

Elizabeth Bennet stonewalls her way through a disagreeable encounter with Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh has heard that her wealthy nephew, Fitzwilliam Darcy, is planning to propose to Elizabeth Bennet, instead of her own daughter. She has raced to Longbourn, Elizabeth’s home, to demand an explanation of the ‘impossible’, but Lizzy sees no reason to be defensive.

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Picture: By Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), © Sailko, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

5

The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat

In most contests the choices are win, lose or draw, but what happened here remains a mystery.

An Irish tale dating back to 1807 tells of two Cats of Kilkenny, who fought until nothing was left of them but their tails. In ‘The Duel’, a children’s rhyme by American writer Eugene Field, a dog and a cat took things a step further.

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Picture: © MiNe, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

6

How I Met Nastenka

The story-teller recalls his first meeting with Nastenka, and the man who brought them together.

‘White Nights’ (1848) is set in St Petersburg during those enchanted June nights when the sun barely dips below the horizon. It was on such a night that the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s tale caught his first glimpse of the woman he came to know as Nastenka, and he was far too highly strung to resist the spell.

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Picture: © Serge Novikoff, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

7

Columbus

Arthur Clough marvels at the vision of a man who could cross the Atlantic without knowing there was a farther shore.

In August 1492, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) of Genoa set out across the Atlantic in ships provided to him by Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II of Spain, reaching the Bahamas the following October. Europeans of his day had only the unproven theory of a round globe to guide them, and nearly four hundred years later Arthur Clough was still in awe of Columbus’s daring.

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Picture: By Jose Maria Obregon (1832–1902), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.

8

Who’ll Turn the Grindstone?

Whenever Charles Miner suspected an ulterior motive, he would say quietly ‘That man has an axe to grind!’

When someone has a hidden, ulterior motive for what he does, we say ‘he has an axe to grind’. The origin of this saying appears to be an essay in the Luzerne Federalist, a Pennsylvania newspaper, for September 7th, 1810. The author, Charles Miner, edited the paper with his brother Asher; later, Charles became an anti-slavery campaigner and a Congressman.

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Picture: By Just L'Hernault (1832-1922), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.

9

Mystery at Compton Wynyates

The Tudor mansion of Compton Wynyates is full of secrets and puzzles, some macabre, some downright peculiar.

Compton Wynyates is a country house in Warwickshire, begun in the 1480s by Edmund Compton. The house bears the marks of the Reformation, with priest-holes for persecuted Roman clergy, and of the Civil War, with hiding places for the family and Royalist soldiers. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I all stayed there.

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Picture: © AJD, Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.