The beginning of Robert Southey’s classic fairy tale.
The story of the Three Bears is a classic children’s tale from 1837 that first appeared in The Doctor, a seven-volume miscellany by Robert Southey published in 1834-47. In his original, there was no naughty, flaxen-haired Goldilocks, just a spiteful old woman. What follows is the beginning of Southey’s story.
During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Horatio Nelson decided it was time to turn a blind eye.
Horatio Nelson lost his right eye in battle off Corsica in 1793, and his right arm at Tenerife in 1797. Undeterred, and now a Rear Admiral, he was in the line of fire again at Copenhagen on April 2nd, 1801: a vital action, as Denmark was hampering England’s efforts to fend off invasion from Napoleon’s France. By lunchtime his Commander-in-chief Sir Hyde Parker, some way behind, was getting anxious.
A London barrister indulges in courtroom theatrics to win a case, but it turns out that not everything is as it seems.
In 1858, a witness testified in a US court to seeing a man murdered in bright moonlight; but in a dramatic twist, defence attorney Abraham Lincoln swept out an almanac showing this was not possible, and the case fell through. Over twenty years earlier, Robert Southey had recorded a bizarre parallel involving a barrister at the Old Bailey, only there was an even more dramatic twist to that tale.
Even before he was born, St Dunstan was marked out to lead the English Church and nation to more peaceful times.
In 793, Vikings swept across Northumbria and extinguished the beacon of Lindisfarne, symbol of England’s Christian civilisation. Much of the land lay under a pagan shadow for over a century, but St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of King Edgar (r. 959-975), helped to rekindle both Church and State.