The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
When Robert Southey called for a fairer and greener economy, Thomas Macaulay warned that only politicians and bureaucrats would thank him.
There is nothing new in calling for high taxes to subsidise a fairer, greener economy. Poet Robert Southey did it in 1829, dreaming of a de-industrialised England of apple-cheeked labourers, charming cottages and smiling prosperity. Macaulay dubbed it ‘rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather than steam-engines and independence,’ and reminded him what State-funded projects too often look like.
An unemployed French labourer was amazed when a friend suggested becoming a French master to refined English ladies.
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859, 1866) was a book suited to a time of social change. For centuries, the elite had dictated a man’s trade and harvested most of the fruits of his labour, but the Industrial Revolution was changing all that. Smiles gave an example of just what was now possible in a free country.
When Lili Dehn was bundled out of the Alexander Palace in the Spring of 1917, Empress Alix reassured her that they would meet again.
Lili Dehn was a close friend of Empress Alexandra, Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter and consort of Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire. In March 1917, the new Communist powers forced the Emperor to abdicate and confined Lili and the royal family to the Alexander Palace. It was not long before Alexander Kerensky of the ‘Provisional Government’ ordered Lili and Alix’s disabled friend Anna to leave.
As a young prince Henry V was ‘fierce and of wanton courage,’ Thomas Elyot tells us, but there was one man with courage to match his.
Young prince Henry, son of King Henry IV of England, won himself a reputation as an irresponsible tearaway. It was this that led his counterpart in France, the Dauphin, to underestimate him; had the Dauphin heard this tale, first told by Tudor diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot, surely he would have thought twice before despatching that infamous box of tennis balls on Henry’s accession in 1413.
A runaway slave is recaptured, and charged with ingratitude by the master who has taken such pains to afford him economic security.
Between 1792 and 1796, John Aikin and his sister Anna Barbauld published a series of children’s stories titled ‘Evenings at Home.’ Among them was an imaginary dialogue in which a plantation owner accused a slave of ingratitude for running away. It is relevant not only to the history of Abolition but also to that politics which promises cradle-to-grave security in exchange for letting an elite shape our world.
John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ opens with Christian wondering how to convince his wife that their town and their family are in immediate danger.
John Bunyan’s groundbreaking allegorical novel ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (1678) opens with John in Bedford County Gaol, where he was imprisoned for holding unlicensed Christian gatherings. He recalls the time many years earlier when it first came to him, with disconcerting conviction, that there should be more to a believer’s Sunday than playing tip-cat on the village green.