361
John Milton reminded Parliament that the Truth wasn’t what they and their fact-checkers in Stationers’ Hall made it.
In 1643, shortly after the Civil War with Charles I (r. 1625-1649) began, Parliament ordered a crackdown on what we would call fake news and disinformation, censoring and licensing political comment and telling the public only what Parliament thought it was good for us to know. John Milton, himself a Parliamentarian, felt obliged to publish an anguished protest at such cowardly behaviour.
Posted August 14 2021
362
Hannah Mullens describes her battle to reach out to wealthy Indian ladies with nothing to do, nothing to think about and nowhere to go.
From the 1850s, Calcutta-born Hannah Mullens (1826–1861) travelled all over India trying to bring literacy, self-respect and spiritual consolation into the dreary leisure of zenanas, the cloistered women’s quarters of well-to-do Indian families. The following account is taken from a letter she wrote from Nagercoil on India’s southernmost tip, then in the Kingdom of Travancore.
Posted August 11 2021
363
When Ambassador Molesworth criticised the government of Christian V, the Danish king cried ‘off with his head!’.
Christian V, King of Denmark and Norway from 1670 to 1699, was a great admirer of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV of France, and sought to emulate the glory of Louis’s court, his ‘divine right of kings’ and his absolute power of government. Over here, though, Parliament had thrown out James II in 1688 for doing the same, and his replacement William III gathered that in England no one was beyond criticism.
Posted August 10 2021
364
Jack Pansay has just bought an engagement ring for the bewitching Kitty Mannering, yet to his annoyance it is the late Mrs Wessington he is thinking about.
Jack Pansay last saw Mrs Agnes Keith-Wessington here in Simla, perched in a rickshaw and weeping her eternal cuckoo cry: “Jack, darling! it’s all a mistake; do let’s be friends”; but for him their shipboard romance had long been over. Now she was dead, and April 1885 found him at Hamilton’s, buying Kitty Mannering an engagement ring, and trying to shake the feeling that someone has been calling his name.
Posted August 7 2021
365
The doorman of a Paris theatre had strict instructions to keep dogs outside, but it was the humans they let in who caused all the trouble.
The following anecdote comes from a pamphlet entitled Popular Sketches of British Quadrupeds, published in 1815. Reflecting the gentler times of Georgian England, the authors looked not only at working animals but also at pets, and treated the reader to a tissue of heartwarming tales of their affection and intelligence.
Posted August 6 2021
366
Richard Cobden told his audience in the London Tavern that however much sabre-rattling was heard in St Petersburg, the average Russian was a man of peace.
In the opinion of Richard Cobden, the Rochdale MP, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia wasn’t a proper Russian. In his fondness for meddling in the affairs of other European countries he resembled the colonially-minded politicians of the West more than his fellow Russians, for whom the thought of being conscripted for military adventures beyond Holy Russia was abhorrent.
Posted August 5 2021