The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Dostoevsky had to break it to Moscow’s students that ordinary Russians found their brand of politics patronising.
On April 3rd, 1878, a group of students was beaten up by the locals during a Moscow demonstration. Fyodor Dostoevsky, responding to their plea for sympathy, replied as nicely as he could that the public just didn’t see students as their friends. They saw them as foreign agents, the tools of pro-Western elites who didn’t understand the people — and worse, didn’t respect them.
On his visits to Durham Gaol, prison reformer John Howard found conditions that were all too familiar.
‘There’s Nae Good Luck in Durham Gaol’ was the title of a music-hall song by Tyneside song-maker Tommy Armstrong (1848-1919). It would have been scant consolation to know it, but conditions in the 1770s were far worse than in Tommy’s day. Here, pioneering prison reformer John Howard takes us on a very personal guided tour.
Reading and writing should have taught the people more than name-calling and how to manipulate opinion.
The spread of literacy, said William Hazlitt, should have taught us judgment and taste. Instead, it has taught us how to heap hurtful abuse on anyone who makes us feel challenged or humbled. Critics lavish praise on writers who sneer with them in all the right places, and then suddenly destroy them in the most public fashion — and the reading public laps it up.
‘Alpha of the Plough’ hoped Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not treat his old friends as he treated his favourite books.
As a rule, people who write well are also well-read, but it should not be supposed that they keep up with everything new that hits the shelves or receives breathless praise in the press. Alfred Gardiner, columnist for the Star, was like many professional writers suspicious of new titles, and preferred the company of characters he had come to know well.
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.
Anne Thackeray saw something satisfying in the self-control of Anne Elliot.
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.