157
A charming children’s rhyme that is also a test of the clearest speaker’s diction.
Sir Edward Abbott Parry had recently been appointed one of her majesty Queen Victoria’s judges when he published Katawampus (1895), a book of tales and rhymes for young children. It all began, it seems, when Pater (Latin for father), in despair over his fractious children, took a Christmas Day dip in the sea... but before telling that extraordinary story, Pater gave these little verses from his ‘book of rhymes’.
Picture: © Peter Trimming, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 generic.. Source.
Posted September 12 2023
158
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.
Picture: By James Bretherton (?1730-1806), after William Henry Bunbury (1750-1811), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted September 10 2023
159
Samuel Pepys ran into a little knot of seafaring men at the Exchange, who told him some hair-raising tales about their time in Algiers.
On February 8th, 1661, Samuel Pepys, a civil servant with the Royal Navy, popped over to the Exchange to meet William Warren, who supplied wood for the nation’s warships. Warren was unavailable, but the convivial Pepys invited some Naval officers to the nearby Golden Fleece tavern, where he listened open-mouthed to their recollections of life in the slave compounds of Algiers.
Picture: By Willem van de Velde (1603-1707), via the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted August 27 2023
160
When Rhoda, maid to John Mark and his mother, said Peter was standing at the gate, nobody in the house believed her.
St Peter was imprisoned during the purge of Christians ordered by Herod Agrippa in AD 44, during which St James, brother of St John the Evangelist, was executed. Peter’s miraculous jailbreak is a tale into which another evangelist, St Mark, also comes; but the star of Luke’s superbly crafted account is Rhoda, the scatterbrained maid.
Picture: © Andrey Mironov, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted July 13 2023
161
In 1720, Welsh promoter William Howell opened a pleasure garden at Belsize House, but the pleasures drew the magistrates’ frowns.
In 1722, the pleasure gardens at Belsize House near Hampstead were raided by constables on the orders of horrified magistrates, as being a den of gambling, lewdness and riot. It had all started innocently enough two years earlier, after an enterprising Welshman named William Howell obtained a lease on the stately house and gardens.
Picture: By Jan Siberechts (1627-?1703), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted July 3 2023
162
On a countryside ramble in West Sussex, William Cobbett finds the weather turning against him.
William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) was a best-seller in its day, a travelogue of his wanderings through England’s green and pleasant land, and a diary of his meetings with farmers and their families. August 2nd, 1823, found William atop Duncton Hill as he made his way across the South Downs from Petworth to Singleton in West Sussex, looking up at an ominous sky.
Picture: © Robin Stott, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted June 29 2023