Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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145

Milton! Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour

William Wordsworth comes back from France and realises with a shock what his own country has become.

In 1802, William Wordsworth returned from a brief trip across the Channel and was suddenly struck by the ugly noise of London. He was not singing the praises of post-revolutionary Paris, where ‘quiet desolation’ reigned. But England’s complacent wealth, her vanity and parade, were no better, for he could detect little happiness in them, and no moral fibre.

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Picture: By William Daniell (1769-1837), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

146

Money to Burn

Pip receives a visitor from among the criminal classes, but his condescending attempt to play the gentleman rebounds spectacularly.

One night, Pip Pirrip, now twenty-three, opens the door of his London apartment and finds a rough-looking man of about sixty outside. This alarming visitor asks him to recall helping a sorry convict, hunted down by the police on the Kent marshes sixteen years before. Uncomfortably, Pip does, and also remembers that the convict had afterwards sent him two pounds. A thought befitting a gentleman then strikes him.

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Picture: By Adolph Tidemand (1814–1876), Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.

147

Tough Customer

A little anecdote about a schoolmaster who wasn’t as much of a Wackford Squeers as he appeared to be.

Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839) firmly fixed in the public’s mind the image of the Victorian schoolmaster as a Wackford Squeers, pitilessly exploiting his pupils for labour and feeding them little more than kitchen scraps in return. The poulterer in this little anecdote seems to have fallen easily into this trap, and paid the price.

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Picture: © Hari K Patibanda, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

148

Mary’s Lamb

A much-loved children’s poem, even if most of us struggle to remember more than a few lines.

Sarah Hale was an American novelist, poet, magazine editor and literary critic, who campaigned vigorously against slavery and for the employment and education of women (she helped found Vassar College). A great believer in women as ‘God’s appointed agent of morality’, Hale saw the homemaker as crucial to the happiness of the nation. Her collection of Poems for Our Children (1830) included ‘Mary’s Lamb’.

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Picture: © ITookSomePhotos, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

149

Rochester Reverie

Mr Pickwick has embarked on a tour of Kent, and this sunny morning finds him leaning over the parapet of Rochester Bridge, deep in reflection.

Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers follows Mr Samuel Pickwick as he tours the home counties with his friends, and records his impressions for the Pickwick Club. He reached Rochester without anything worse befalling his party than Mr Winkle being challenged to a duel for an offence he could not remember giving; and thus it was that before breakfast one fine morning, Mr Pickwick stood upon the bridge surveying the castle and countryside with a contented eye.

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Picture: By Edward Dayes (1763-1804), via the Yale Center for British Art and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

150

The Selfishness of Mr Willoughby

Now that Mr Willoughby has been found, and found to be married, Elinor Dashwood has the disagreeable task of making sure that her sister feels it is all for the best.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility turns on the baffling behaviour of Mr Willoughby, who assiduously courts Marianne Dashwood only to vanish from the neighbourhood. When he is finally tracked down in London, he has married a woman of fashion and wealth, and Marianne’s sister Elinor — with every right to a resounding ‘I told you so’ — has to make sure that Marianne and their mother have both accepted the realities.

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Picture: By Michel Martin Drolling (1786-1851), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.