British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
Joseph Joachim was regarded by most people in Europe as the greatest violinist ever, but in the home of Sterndale Bennett there was a dissenting voice.
Pianist, composer and teacher Sir William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875) enjoyed the friendship and respect of many illustrious figures in the world of music, including Felix Mendelssohn, Jenny Lind, Robert and Clara Schumann. Bennett appeared alongside supreme violinist Joseph Joachim on many occasions, but not everyone in the Bennett household shared Sterndale’s admiration for the great man.
Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck used to love hearing the church bells ring the New Year in, but now the chimes make him feel guilty, and afraid for the world.
It is New Year’s Eve, but old Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck, a hard-up widower, is not celebrating. Alderman Cute has got him so worked up about a sustainable economy, food injustice and industrialisation that Trotty despairs for future generations if things carry on as they are. Even the church bells seem to toll the death knell of Victorian England. But that night, the spirits of the bells rise up to demand an apology.
Letitia Barbauld called Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela ‘a new experiment’ in English literature, and to judge by its reception it was very successful.
In November 1740, printer Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) brought out a novel of his own, a series of letters entitled Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. He promised boldly ‘to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes’, but trod a fine line and brought many a blush to the cheek of modesty before virtue was triumphant. It made him a celebrity overnight.
Months after promising England would help Holland escape the clutches of Catholic Europe, Charles II did a secret deal with France to sell out Holland and England together.
In 1668, Charles II formed the ‘Triple Alliance’ to stop Louis XIV of France from forcing Holland, a Protestant country, into a European league of Catholic states. Just two years later, egged on by his brother James, Duke of York, Charles not only offered to carve up Holland with Louis, but engaged to bring England along too. Barely a soul knew until Sir John Dalrymple broke the story a hundred years later.
The modern match is ignited by friction, a simple idea but one which had not occurred to anyone until 1826, when a Stockton pharmacist dropped a stick.
Until 1826, lighting a fire, a candle or a pipe was not an easy business. Matches as we know them were in their infancy, a toilsome affair requiring a man to juggle little bottles of noxious chemicals and perhaps a pair of pliers. But that year, a merry pharmacist from Stockton-on-Tees called John Walker (1781-1859) liberated us from all this, and quite by accident.
In 1609, Englishman Thomas Harriot turned his new-fangled telescope on the moon, and sketched for the first time the face of another world.
Three hundred years after the death of Thomas Harriot or Hariot (?1560-1621), the American journal Science sketched the life of a man who, though almost forgotten by succeeding generations, was involved in some of the greatest discoveries of European science, and embroiled in some of the most stirring events in English politics.