Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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1039

Michaelmas

A celebration of St Michael, captain of heaven’s angel host, courteous warrior, and healer.

St Michael is the supreme general of all the angels of God, a figure attested in the Book of Daniel, the Epistle of Jude, and the Revelation of St John the Divine, as well as in Rabbinic literature. In the time of St Bede, as still today in the Eastern Churches, he was associated with healing and a safe passage to heaven.

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Picture: © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

1040

The Wolf, the Bear and Cat Ivanovitch

A faithful but unprepossessing pet is turned out of hearth and home.

This Russian folktale is a story about a tom cat who is abandoned by his fastidious owner, but shows all the philosophical resilience of cats, and reinvents himself as Cat Ivanovitch, Head Forester of all the animals of the wood. But he could not have done it without the help of a little vixen called Lisabeta, and a good deal of luck.

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Picture: © Roswitha Budde, Cattery vom Hohen Timp, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

1041

Japan’s First Railway

As Japan’s ruling shoguns resist the tide of progress, a Nagasaki-based Scottish entrepreneur steps in.

The story of Japan’s first railway is bound up with the story of the country’s emergence from two centuries of self-imposed isolation. It is a tale in which the British played an important role, from engineer Edmund Morel to Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant and railway enthusiast who took considerable risks to forge Japan’s lasting ties with the British Isles.

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Picture: Via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

1042

The Free-Wheeler

Composer Ethel Smyth buys a new-fangled ladies’ bicycle, and scandalises the neighbours.

Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘Forsyth’) was a successful composer of opera and orchestral music, whose lightly-written memoirs – she was acquainted with Brahms, Grieg and several other public figures in music – were also well received. Here, she recalls her scandalous purchase of a ladies’ bicycle in 1894.

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Picture: By Henry Summer Watson, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

1043

Alice gets an English Lesson

Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, and it turns out that she has been using words wrong all her life.

Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty exhibits all the pride that goeth before his famous fall, and also the same proprietary attitude to the meaning of words fashionable in Westminster. Here, he has just boasted of his ‘un-birthday present’ from the White King and Queen, and Alice is puzzled.

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Picture: © Cogdogblog, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

1044

Thomas Brassey

The unsung surveyor from Cheshire, who built railways and made friends across the world.

The Victorian railway engineer Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) is not the household name that he perhaps ought to be, chiefly because he worked through agents and alongside partners. Nonetheless, his knowledge and business acumen lies behind much of the rail network in Britain, and helped start the railway revolution from France to Australia.

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Picture: © Optimist on the run, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA-3.0.. Source.