955
Wilkins Micawber had little to give David Copperfield at their parting, save two words of advice.
Wilkins Micawber has just been released from a spell in prison for debt, and has resolved to take his wife away from London to Plymouth, leaving David Copperfield to find new lodgings. There is little that Mr Micawber can give David in leave-taking, except two words of heartfelt advice.
Posted February 16 2018
956
George Stephenson was only too pleased to save the Government from its scientific advisers.
When a line from London to Newcastle was first planned in the 1840s, Brunel recommended an atmospheric railway, which pulls carriages along with vacuum tubes laid between the rails instead of locomotives. The decision lay with the Government’s chief engineer, Robert Stephenson, but his father George made sure the idea got no further than Robert’s outer office.
Posted February 15 2018
957
Fursey was a 7th-century Irish monk whose visions of the afterlife made a great impression on St Bede.
Shortly before Lent each year, the Church dedicates one Sunday to reflection on the Last Judgment. For the seventh-century monk Bede, the go-to authority on the matter was Fursey (?597-650), an Irish missionary to the Kingdom of the East Angles just a generation earlier, who had received several visions of the soul’s journey to heaven.
Posted February 13 2018
958
Oldham’s firebrand MP William Cobbett rips into the the City of London for blocking economic and political progress in India.
In 1813, the East India Company held a Government-sponsored monopoly over all trade between London and her colonies, but a history of scandals and mismanagement led to calls for free trade. The City of London objected strongly in a Commons debate in January 1813, and William Cobbett MP could hardly believe his ears.
Posted February 9 2018
959
Henry Mayhew, co-founder of ‘Punch’, tells two anecdotes about the Victorian cabbie.
‘London Characters’ was a tissue of light-hearted observations on everyday life in the capital written by Henry Mayhew, co-founder of the satirical magazine ‘Punch’. Mayhew made a career out of satisfying the middle classes’ curiosity about the working man, something the working man did not always appreciate.
Posted February 7 2018
960
A stranger warns the people of Shorapur that they will come to regret their hospitality.
In 1850, Charles Dickens’s magazine ‘Household Words’ carried this curious tale, written by Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor, who at the time was a correspondent on ‘The Times’ in India. Set in the legendary past, the story concerns the town of Shorapur in India, which in Dickens’s time was still a semi-independent Kingdom, and a question as simple as it is timeless: Cats, or Dogs?
Posted February 5 2018