The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A cat belonging to a Carthusian monastery in Paris gets a free lunch, but who is exploiting whom?
In his little book about cats, Victorian cartoonist Charles Ross describes the criminal career of a cat attached to a Carthusian monastery in Paris. His story confirms that cats are adept at all kind of thievery and opportunism, but also reminds us that they are not the only ones.
Young inventor James Watt’s life in London was overshadowed by the perpetual fear of being snatched.
In 1756, James Watt was not yet the creator of the first commercial steam engine, but a lowly maker of scientific instruments in London. The Seven Years’ War was just getting under way, and Watt was so afraid of being scooped up for service at sea or in some colonial plantation that he dared not go out of his door.
Michael Faraday’s tour of Europe included a ‘picturesque’ multicultural event on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.
In November 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte, smarting from his humiliating Retreat from Moscow, was waging war across Europe. This did not stop Sir Humphry Davy (who called him ‘the Corsican robber’) going to Paris to receive the Napoleon Prize, or young Michael Faraday from going with him, and afterwards they went on to the Kingdom of Naples, then under French control.
After a thousand years of uneasy cohabitation, Edward I decided that there was no place for Jews in his Kingdom.
Few countries can claim to have a clean record when it comes to the treatment of Jews, and England is no exception. Confined by law and custom to trade and money-lending, Jews were both indispensable to the economy and the target of suspicion and resentment, leading King Edward I to give an infamous order.
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.