The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Davy Copperfield is not pleased at having to compete for his mother’s affection with Edward Murdstone.
Young Davy Copperfield never knew his father, who died before Davy was born. There came a time when his shy but pretty mother began staying out to dinners, and after one of them she was brought home by a raven-dark-haired gentleman, whom Davy recalled seeing the Sunday before.
Victorian England was agog at the prospect of Tom Sayers meeting a confident but unproven challenger from the USA.
Boxing’s first world title bout, on April 17th, 1860, featured England’s own Tom Sayers against a challenger from the USA, John Heenan, ‘the Benicia Boy’. It was the boxing event of a whole generation, and bare-knuckle fighting’s swansong.
Charles Villiers Stanford found it necessary to play dumb on a visit to snowy Leipzig.
Composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford has been reminiscing about his time in Germany, and the devotees of ‘Mensur’, academic fencing. They were nothing if not courageous, taking a baffling pride in the scars; but they hung like a sword of Damocles over the heads of the merely careless, as Stanford discovered for himself on a visit to Leipzig in 1875.
Having brought hundreds of convicts to New South Wales, Arthur Phillip then had to conjure order out of their chaos.
The first British settlement in Australia was established at Sydney Cove on January 26th, 1788, and named after the Home Secretary. The policy of penal transportation was barbarity, but out of it Captain Phillips and his successors conjured civilisation — and began by disobeying orders.
Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, was so proud of her fourteen children that she brazenly claimed the privileges of a goddess.
Niobe was a legendary Queen of Thebes with fourteen lovely children. In a moment of motherly pride, she scoffed at the goddess Leto, mother of just two. But they were Apollo and Artemis; and Niobe had unleashed an unstoppable divine feud that would make her name synonymous with tears.
The Maharaja of Jodhpur called on his subjects to do their bit and stop the Nazis.
On May 15th, 1942, Maharaja Sir Umaid Singh of Jodhpur spoke at the inauguration of the National War Front in Jodhpur. Already many thousands of Indians had volunteered to help stop Nazi Germany from taking Britain’s place as India’s Presiding Power, and now His Highness addressed himself to those left behind.