The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Mrs Squeers has lost the school spoon, and is uncomfortably frank about its importance.
Impoverished young gentleman Nicholas Nickleby has accepted a position as junior master at Dotheboys Hall, a remote Yorkshire school managed by Mr Wackford Squeers and his wife. On his arrival, Nicholas is treated to a rapid initiation into the school’s educational vision.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the demand for hard evidence as a peculiarly English trait.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) believed that there was no people in Europe so committed to hard, scientific facts than the Victorian English, so unwilling to act until all the evidence is in – a ‘Victorian value’ worth rediscovering today.
Richard Hannay was finding life in London a little slow until a self-confessed dead man walked into his rooms.
It is May 1914, and Scotsman Richard Hannay has recently arrived in London from South Africa. Hannay is bored, so when a strange American calling himself Franklin P. Scudder slips past him into his flat, he looks forward to being entertained.
The hero of Waterloo needed all his men to believe in him that day, but none believed in him more than his cook.
Charles Dickens’s ‘Household Words’ for 1851 recounted a summer visit to the site of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where the Duke of Wellington masterminded the defeat of Emperor Napoleon. Some of the tales told by the guides were of doubtful authenticity, but Dickens liked this one about the Duke’s personal chef.
An obscure officer in the Roman Army gains a dizzying promotion after performing a simple act of kindness.
In the fifth century, about the time when St Patrick was preaching in Ireland, far away in the Roman Empire’s glorious capital of Constantinople an obscure Roman soldier performed a kindness for a blind man which brought the most rapid promotion one could ever imagine.
William Howitt had some advice for Victorian tourists hoping for an authentic experience at the battlefield of Waterloo.
The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 created a tourist attraction for patriotic Englishmen hoping to connect with the Duke of Wellington’s legendary victory. Some tour guides, Charles Dickens cautioned, were inclined to fantasise, but happily an authentic voice was on hand.