British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
Joseph Addison complains that the famous Cries of London are a lot of fuss about nothing.
‘The Cries of London’, the various musical and not-so-musical calls of street vendors in Queen Anne’s capital, were widely regarded with affection and pride. But the endless drumming of tins and kettles left Joseph Addison’s nerves raw, and the medley of slogans and doggerel verses was if anything worse.
A Portuguese merchant assesses Great Britain’s market under the Hanoverians.
Manoel Gonzales tells us that he was a native of Lisbon, educated by the Jesuits. His mother pulled him from the school on suspicion that the priests were after his inheritance, so Manoel set himself to expand his father’s business instead. On April 23rd, 1730 – St George’s Day, as he noted — Gonzales set out for Falmouth, intending to reconnoitre his chosen market.
Lord Macaulay describes the toils of a typical country gentleman visiting London in the time of Charles II.
Macaulay’s influential history of England, which first appeared in 1848, was a paean to Progress and especially to progress in Britain. By his day, London was truly England’s capital, a cosmopolitan railway hub; back in the 1660s, however, it was an island entire of itself, and any rural squire who struggled in over the dirty and rutted roads found himself in a foreign land.
The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.
Several English pianists impressed Joseph Haydn on his visits to London, but Maria Hester Park was a particular favourite.
What sort of piano music should we imagine Elizabeth Bennet playing in the drawing rooms of Longbourn and Meryton? The only name dropped in Jane Austen’s novels is John Baptist Cramer, but we do know of other widely published composers of the day; several were women, and one of the most celebrated was Maria Hester Park, née Reynolds.
Cuthbert’s friend comes asking for a priest to attend his dying wife — so long as it isn’t Cuthbert.
St Cuthbert’s miracles not only brought healing or deliverance from danger, but left others wiser and kinder for having lived through them. In this example, his friend Hildemer learnt that illness, and specifically mental illness, is nothing for a Christian to be ashamed of.