127
Clever people have realised that it is easier to get people on your side by mockery than by persuasion.
William Paley complained that critics of Christianity no longer troubled themselves with civilised debate. Instead, they scattered sniggering remarks throughout popular and academic literature, in the hope of laughing the public into atheism; for their knowledge of human nature had taught them that scorn is far more persuasive than argument.
Posted October 3 2023
128
John of Gaunt tries to persuade his son Henry that banishment from England isn’t such a bad thing, if you think about in the right way.
In 1398, King Richard II, unpopular throughout his kingdom and fearing for his throne, ordered his cousin and rival Henry Bolingbroke to leave the country, together with Henry’s father John of Gaunt. As Shakespeare tells the tale, John did his best to bear Henry up under the blow, encouraging him to rock himself with fairy tales into a doze of happy acceptance.
Posted October 2 2023
129
Silas Marner, the weaver, plans to take a comforting look at his savings while he eats his dinner.
Silas Marner, the weaver, lives a reclusive life now, following an unhappy episode when he was framed for stealing. One night, while waiting for his supper to cook (a nice bit of pork, a gift or he would not have indulged himself) he decides to fetch his savings from their secret place beneath the floor, and enjoy the sight of them as he eats.
Posted October 2 2023
130
William Wordsworth comes back from France and realises with a shock what his own country has become.
In 1802, William Wordsworth returned from a brief trip across the Channel and was suddenly struck by the ugly noise of London. He was not singing the praises of post-revolutionary Paris, where ‘quiet desolation’ reigned. But England’s complacent wealth, her vanity and parade, were no better, for he could detect little happiness in them, and no moral fibre.
Posted September 28 2023
131
Pip receives a visitor from among the criminal classes, but his condescending attempt to play the gentleman rebounds spectacularly.
One night, Pip Pirrip, now twenty-three, opens the door of his London apartment and finds a rough-looking man of about sixty outside. This alarming visitor asks him to recall helping a sorry convict, hunted down by the police on the Kent marshes sixteen years before. Uncomfortably, Pip does, and also remembers that the convict had afterwards sent him two pounds. A thought befitting a gentleman then strikes him.
Posted September 26 2023
132
A little anecdote about a schoolmaster who wasn’t as much of a Wackford Squeers as he appeared to be.
Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839) firmly fixed in the public’s mind the image of the Victorian schoolmaster as a Wackford Squeers, pitilessly exploiting his pupils for labour and feeding them little more than kitchen scraps in return. The poulterer in this little anecdote seems to have fallen easily into this trap, and paid the price.
Posted September 24 2023