Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
Adam Smith asks employers to pay the most generous wages their finances will allow.
Adam Smith would not have liked the so-called Living Wage. ‘Law can never regulate wages properly,’ he wrote, ‘though it has often pretended to do so.’ But he did like generous wages, out of hard-headed business sense - an argument much more likely actually to raise wages than merely cost jobs.
Adam Smith encourages employers to restrict working hours to reasonable limits, for humanity and for profit.
Adam Smith urges employers not to tempt their employees to overwork. It leads to burn-out and a loss of productivity; and in the worst case scenario, the grasping employer must invest wholly avoidable time and money in training up a replacement.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was commissioned by a fiercely independent Britain, and Beethoven was excited to oblige.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is today associated with the European Union, something of an irony as Beethoven loudly cheered on Britain’s resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte’s dreams of a Europe-wide superstate. Indeed, the Symphony itself arose out of a commission from friends in London in 1817, just two years after Waterloo.
A young English girl in Dr Johnson’s London struggles to share her gift for music.
The story of Anne Ford (1737-1824) is an inspirational tale of determination, which shows two contrasting sides to Georgian England, and reminds us once again that Britain made rapid social progress without the violence seen on the near Continent.
Everyone wanted to know who Beethoven’s favourite composer was.
Ludwig van Beethoven is unquestionably one of the greatest and most influential of all composers, and it was natural that visitors wanted to know whose music he admired most. Towards the end of a tragic life afflicted by deafness, loneliness and financial worries, one composer’s music brought him more solace than any other.
In 1837 William Sterndale Bennett, then regarded as England’s most exciting young composer, made history in quite another... field.
German club cricket began in 1858, courtesy of British and American expatriates living in Berlin. But there is a much earlier game on record, played in Leipzig on June 10th, 1837. One of the participants was William Sterndale Bennett, a young and promising composer, and inevitably perhaps, a Yorkshireman.