The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A transported convict writes home to England urging his wife to join him as soon as possible.
Caroline Chisholm (1808–1877) spent the years 1838 to 1846 in Australia, helping migrants to settle in and reunite with their families. On Tuesday February 26th, 1850, Charles Dickens, who was preparing the very first issue of Household Words, called on her in the hope of publishing some of the migrants’ letters she had acquired. The following passage is taken from one of those letters.
Leander recalls that first night when he dared the perilous waters of the Hellespont, and swam to meet his lover Hero.
According to legend, one stormy night the wind extinguished the candle that Hero lit to guide her lover Leander as he swam to her across the Dardanelles Strait, and he was lost. Roman poet Ovid imagined the letter that Leander might have sent by ship to his darling, while he waited impatiently for calmer waters.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli stoked fears of Russian aggression, John Bright said that Russia was only threatening when she felt threatened.
In 1879, British politicians were warning that we must occupy Afghanistan to prevent Russia invading India, and that Emperor Alexander II’s military operations in the Balkans were not a liberation but an excuse to sweep across Europe that must be met with force. John Bright watched this escalation with alarm, and urged the Government to make our peace with Russia as we had with France – by trade.
Employees are the key to any entrepreneur’s success, and he must know them intimately, trust them completely and pay them generously.
Scottish engineer James Nasmyth, son of an Edinburgh artist, set up the Bridgewater Foundry in Patricroft, Salford, in 1836. He tells us in his Autobiography that in the competitive market of Victorian heavy industry, the key to success was making sure that his employees never wanted to work for anyone else.
Henry Maudslay, the great engineer, had seen enough apprentices to last him a lifetime.
In 1829, artist Alexander Nasmyth tried to realise his son James’s abiding dream, an apprenticeship at Maudslay’s engineering firm in London. Presuming on a slight acquaintance, father and son presented themselves at Henry Maudslay’s home in Westminster, only to be told that apprentices had been such a disappointment that he would take no more. A guided tour of the factory was small compensation.
A loyal Scotsman on the run from pro-English traitors disguised himself as a blacksmith’s apprentice, but soon gave himself away.
The Scottish surname Nasmyth or Naesmyth is said by scholars to derive, in all probability, from nail-smith. But Scottish engineer James Nasmyth, who appropriately enough in 1839 invented a steam hammer for making enormous iron bars, had heard a different tale, which he set down in his Autobiography.