115
Charles Dickens set his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in the French Revolution seventy years before, but it was far from the dead past to him.
The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are among his most famous. He creates a sense of breathless and surging emotion; he encourages the reader to think of the past as a living, throbbing present; and he reminds us that the present too may stand on the brink of sudden and violent change. The chapter is quite long, but cleverly written and, especially with a few notes, very enlightening.
Picture: By Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1723–1807). Public domain. . Source.
Posted May 30 2024
116
According to Kipling, the British Empire was the last resort of Englishmen who could not stand conditions at home.
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
Picture: By Antonio Gisbert (1834-1901), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted April 19 2024
117
Salesman Richard Cobden wondered why his employers left a full warehouse in his hands without any kind of security.
Richard Cobden, the great liberal statesman, began with few advantages in life. His father, a bankrupt Sussex farmer, handed him over to relatives, who hastily packed the ten-year-old boy off to a Yorkshire boarding school — a veritable Dotheboys Hall. At fifteen, he was released from this captivity, but sweeping the floors for his rich uncle did not seem to promise much better.
Picture: By Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). Public domain.. Source.
Posted April 17 2024
118
Travelling salesman Richard Cobden was still in his twenties when he bought a loss-making mill for a hundred times his annual salary.
At sixteen, poor relation Richard Cobden accepted a menial job from his uncle, who let him know how great a favour it was. Resolutely, Cobden freed himself from family obligations, and by his late twenties he was a trusted broker at the London office of a Manchester textile mill. His next step up was a daring leap.
Picture: © Ian Taylor, Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted April 17 2024
119
The Romans did bring some blessings to Britain, but none so great as the one they did not mean to bring.
In his Child’s History of England Dickens was consistently severe on the abuse of power. The Romans, who ruled here from the first century to the start of the fifth, did not escape his censure. He admitted they had exercised a degree of civilising influence, but in his judgment the most civilising influence in their time had been Christianity, for it exposed the frauds of Britain’s indigenous pagan elite, the Druids.
Picture: © Following Hadrian. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted April 9 2024
120
If Parliament is going to force its will on distant peoples, it must also give them the vote.
In 1775, anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp leapt to the defence of inhabitants of Britain’s thirteen American colonies, who were demanding to be represented in the House of Commons if they were expected to obey the laws passed there. No government, Sharp declared, is legitimate if the common people who are expected to obey its decisions — whether at home or far abroad — are not closely and frequently involved in the decision-making process.
Picture: © Mobilus in Mobili, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted April 8 2024