The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
British statesmen were among those who inspired the career of one of America’s greatest men, Frederick Douglass.
At thirteen, escaped slave Frederick Douglass bought a schoolbook, ‘The Columbian Orator’, for fifty cents. It nurtured gifts of understanding and eloquence that brought Douglass to prominence as America’s leading anti-slavery campaigner, and among his favourite passages were speeches by great British statesmen of his day.
William Hyde Wollaston discovered new elements and helped Faraday to greatness, all from the top of a tea-tray.
A Royal Commission observed in 1819 that while metric measurements do have clear advantages, for many practical purposes imperial measurements are actually more convenient. One of the members of this remarkably sensible Commission was Dr William Wollaston (1766-1828), a man of unimpeachable scientific pedigree.
Faraday’s work on electromagnetism made him an architect of modern living, and one of Albert Einstein’s three most revered physicists.
American physicist Albert Einstein kept three portraits on his wall, men who had inspired his own world-changing study of physics. They were all British: Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Michael Faraday (1791-1867).
An aristocratic statesman was choked with emotion as he reflected on Britain’s creative social mobility.
The Industrial Revolution increased social mobility beyond all measure. Some shook their heads, but for most people, from ordinary working men to aristocratic statesmen, it was a matter of celebration and pride.
What George Stephenson was to the railways of England, Sandford Fleming was to the railways of Canada.
At the start of the nineteenth century, railways brought a handful of struggling colonies together to form a great nation, and Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), then just a young Scottish surveyor from Kirkcaldy, played as important a part in that as any other man.
Benjamin Disraeli did not make a promising start to his Parliamentary career - but he did start with a promise.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Queen Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister, oversaw the expansion of the electorate as well as a range of social reforms aimed at improving the living and working conditions of the poorer classes. He was also an accomplished novelist, though his first attempts had been cruelly mocked by the critics, and his early political career fared little better.