British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
Charles Dickens rails at the way Parliament and do-gooders treat the public like an irresponsible child.
In 1855, a Bill to restrict Sunday trading provoked riots in Hyde Park; Charles Dickens hosted his own in ‘Household Words’. His objection was not to Sunday Observance, a venerable Christian custom which he actively encouraged, but to politicians and campaigners who treat the General Public like a helpless child.
The Dublin to Dun Laoghaire line opened in 1834, and proved a remarkable testimony to the speed of technological progress.
In 1825, the world’s first railway carrying fare-paying public passengers opened, triumphantly tackling the eight-mile stretch between Stockton and Darlington in three hours. Just nine years later, Ireland acquired its own first railway, from Dublin to Dun Laoghaire, and the six-mile journey was over in twenty minutes.
One of England’s most precious artefacts, the Lindisfarne Gospels, was nearly lost at sea.
Just before the Danes sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793, the monks smuggled out the body of St Cuthbert, carrying it on their shoulders all over Northumbria in the hope of finding a place free from violence. Eventually, their successors led by Bishop Eardulf and Abbot Eadred lost heart, and decided to take refuge in Ireland.
American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass contrasts two kinds of ‘nationalist’.
American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in 1845, and loved it. But in time he came to realise that there are two kinds of nationalist: those who want freedom everywhere, and those who want it only for themselves, and will enslave any other land or people in order to get it.
Frederick Douglass, the American runaway slave turned Abolitionist, spent some of his happiest days in Britain.
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland, and became one of America’s leading Abolitionists. Gently forgiving but firm of purpose, Douglass was a champion not only of Abolition but of freedom everywhere, suspicious of communism, committed to national sovereignty and free markets. And in 1845, he instantly fell in love with the British.
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.