The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The offices of the Cheeryble Brothers are humming with excitement over two upcoming weddings, and Tim Linkinwater finds the mood is catching.
Towards the close of Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ young Frank Cheeryble has proposed to Kate Nickleby, and Kate’s brother Nicholas has proposed to Madeleine Bray. The atmosphere in the offices of the Cheeryble Brothers in London is heady with romance; and that old lion Tim Linkinwater, the company clerk, admits to Miss La Creevy, ‘a young lady of fifty,’ that the mood is infectious.
Mill owner William Grant was deeply hurt by a scurrilous pamphlet circulated by a fellow businessman, and vowed the miscreant would live to regret it.
Among the many memorable characters in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby are Ned and Charles Cheeryble, the vehemently philanthropic brothers who employ Nicholas on a delicate mission to Walter Bray. They are widely believed to be based on William (1769-1842) and Daniel (?1780-1855) Grant of Ramsbottom in Lancashire, and from this tale one can see the similarities very clearly.
William Jerrold saw the new-fangled sewing machine as an opportunity to get women into the professions — but time was of the essence.
By 1854, the recently invented sewing machine was turning out so much work that the demand for seamstresses was falling off. Sewing had long been a poorly paid but reliable backup for single women fallen on hard times, so journalist William Blanchard Jerrold demanded assurances that Victorian society would allow these women the same job opportunities allowed to men.
In 1798, ‘Plays on the Passions’ appeared in London bookstores, but no one seemed to know who had written them.
In 1798, a volume of three dramas appeared in the English press, under the title of ‘Plays on the Passions.’ The passions were love and hatred, and the dramas were ‘Basil’, ‘The Trial’ and ‘De Monfort.’ They were warmly received but they were also anonymous, and the country’s literary men and women were beside themselves to know who had written them.
Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor recalls his experiences as a judge in the distrustful world of music festivals and brass band contests.
‘Don’t you undertake that job at any price!’ was the advice given to composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor when he was first offered the role of judge at an eisteddfod. But he went, and never regretted it. He fell in love with Wales, and was much in demand ever after for choir festivals and brass band competitions across England too. Even so, the work was not for the faint-hearted.
When the Rising of the North went all wrong in 1569, rebel leader Thomas Percy turned to trusted ally Hector of Harlaw for help.
In 1558, Mary I died and her half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant, assumed the crown. Both the Pope and Philip II of Spain, Mary’s widower, were wrathful but no reaction came until September 1569. Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic, had fled to cousin Elizabeth’s protection, and two Catholic nobles spotted an opportunity for change. George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, takes up the tale of ‘the Rising of the North.’