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In eighteenth-century England, the death penalty was the solution to almost any crime.
In Georgian England, the consensus was that the key to crime prevention was to dangle the hangman’s rope before every would-be criminal’s eyes. Whether he was guilty of shoplifting or murder most foul, the hangman awaited him. Yet to some at the Old Bailey the news that they wouldn’t be up on a hanging charge came as a disappointment, as George Wrong explains.
Picture: By an anonymous artist, via the Wellcome Collection and Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted January 11
20
Anne Thackeray saw something in Jane Austen’s heroines that she missed in their more modern sisters.
Anne Thackeray wondered if the novelists of her own generation (she singled out George Eliot) were bathing the reader in a little too much emotion. Austen’s heroines did not share so intimately, or express so freely, but she had studied their characters more closely. Such a one was Anne Elliot, of Persuasion.
Picture: By James Peale (1749–1831), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted January 4
21
The beginning of Robert Southey’s classic fairy tale.
The story of the Three Bears is a classic children’s tale from 1837 that first appeared in The Doctor, a seven-volume miscellany by Robert Southey published in 1834-47. In his original, there was no naughty, flaxen-haired Goldilocks, just a spiteful old woman. What follows is the beginning of Southey’s story.
Picture: By Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted January 2
22
A Russian princess admitted defeat with a most gracious compliment.
John Smeaton (1724-1792) was an English engineer who made advances in water and steam power, and engineered bridges, canals, harbours and land drainage schemes. Such was his reputation that Empress Catherine of Russia, who had a high regard for English know-how, dangled the lure of her glittering Court and immense treasury in the hope of landing him.
Picture: By Dmitry Levitzky (1735-1822), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted January 1
23
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.
In 1803, William Wilberforce threw his weight behind compuslory vaccination for smallpox, declaring that those who refused it were endangering society. William Cobbett replied with an open letter, in which he wondered whether any Government could resist applying the same logic to every habit, preference or opinion they could label as a social menace.
Picture: By Donaldson Brothers, Five Points, NY, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted December 31 2024
24
Edith Nesbit brings down the curtain on ‘The Railway Children’.
Most novelists agonise over their opening line. Edith Nesbit’s opener for The Railway Children (1905) wasn’t bad, but her final page takes the breath away. You will recall that three suburban children have moved with their mother to a small cottage near a railway line, after some men took their well-to-do father away one night in a most cloak-and-dagger fashion.
Picture: By Nikolai Yaroshenko (1846-1898), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted December 30 2024