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 more that pioneering engineer George Stephenson understood of the world around him, the more his sense of wonder grew.
Many Victorian scientists rebelled against the Church, at that time dominated by a colourless Calvinism that stifled wonder and mistrusted enthusiasm. But in private, many retained a powerful sense of the reality of God through wondering at his creation, as railway pioneer George Stephenson did.
Sir Hubert Parry was delighted to see teachers and pupils pushing each other to do better.
In an address to the students of the Royal College of Music in April 1918, Sir Hubert Parry said they were fortunate that when the College was founded in 1882, teachers were beginning to understand that the young respond better to respect and persuasion than to drill-ground severity.
Jane Loudon introduces us to two dogs getting on with their busy lives.
Victorian environmentalist John Ruskin complained that the Midland Railway had torn up lovely countryside between Derby, Matlock and Buxton just so that ‘every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’, overlooking the benefits to Derbyshire’s canine population.
With the aid of a slice of beef, a Perth puss takes feline scheming to a new level.
Charles Henry Ross and his wife Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, alias Marie Duval, were the co-creators of Ally Sloper, ‘hero’ of one of the earliest strip cartoons, and the first recurrent character. Charles also had a fund of anecdotes proving that cats are just as clever as “their much-vaunted rival, the dog”.
Richard Cobden saw Britain’s international standing in terms of peaceful trade rather than military interventions.
In 1855, Cobden urged Parliament to tone down its anti-Russian rhetoric, not out of any fondness for St Petersburg’s domestic or foreign policy but because British influence was better felt in industrial innovation and international trade than in annexing land, toppling governments or rattling the Russian bear’s cage.
Georgian Britain braced for war as relations with France in North America, India and mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.
The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) reached from French and British colonies in North America and India to states in modern-day Germany. It seemed glorious at the time for Britain, but it doubled the national debt, and measures to recover the costs triggered the American War of Independence.