85
In time of crisis, so the legend goes, Sir Francis Drake will come to our aid again, as once he did against the Spanish Armada.
Drake’s Drum is a snare drum painted with the arms of Sir Francis Drake, which went with him on his historic voyage around the world in 1577-80. It is said that before his death, he instructed his heirs to keep it safe at Buckland Abbey, his family home in Devon, and promised that if ever England were under threat the people should beat the drum, and he would return. The drum survives to this day.
Posted June 12 2024
86
Ralph Waldo Emerson traced a common thread running throughout English literature.
In English Traits (1856), American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson set himself to examine what it was that made English literature so characteristically English. He came to the conclusion that it was a fondness for robust, grounded language, and for descriptions and ideas that were similarly plain and unaffected.
Posted June 12 2024
87
Charles Dickens set his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in the French Revolution seventy years before, but it was far from the dead past to him.
The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are among his most famous. He creates a sense of breathless and surging emotion; he encourages the reader to think of the past as a living, throbbing present; and he reminds us that the present too may stand on the brink of sudden and violent change. The chapter is quite long, but cleverly written and, especially with a few notes, very enlightening.
Posted May 30 2024
88
According to Kipling, the British Empire was the last resort of Englishmen who could not stand conditions at home.
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
Posted April 19 2024
89
Salesman Richard Cobden wondered why his employers left a full warehouse in his hands without any kind of security.
Richard Cobden, the great liberal statesman, began with few advantages in life. His father, a bankrupt Sussex farmer, handed him over to relatives, who hastily packed the ten-year-old boy off to a Yorkshire boarding school — a veritable Dotheboys Hall. At fifteen, he was released from this captivity, but sweeping the floors for his rich uncle did not seem to promise much better.
Posted April 17 2024
90
Travelling salesman Richard Cobden was still in his twenties when he bought a loss-making mill for a hundred times his annual salary.
At sixteen, poor relation Richard Cobden accepted a menial job from his uncle, who let him know how great a favour it was. Resolutely, Cobden freed himself from family obligations, and by his late twenties he was a trusted broker at the London office of a Manchester textile mill. His next step up was a daring leap.
Posted April 17 2024