7
The beginning of Robert Southey’s classic fairy tale.
The story of the Three Bears is a classic children’s tale from 1837 that first appeared in The Doctor, a seven-volume miscellany by Robert Southey published in 1834-47. In his original, there was no naughty, flaxen-haired Goldilocks, just a spiteful old woman. What follows is the beginning of Southey’s story.
Posted January 2
8
A Russian princess admitted defeat with a most gracious compliment.
John Smeaton (1724-1792) was an English engineer who made advances in water and steam power, and engineered bridges, canals, harbours and land drainage schemes. Such was his reputation that Empress Catherine of Russia, who had a high regard for English know-how, dangled the lure of her glittering Court and immense treasury in the hope of landing him.
Posted January 1
9
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.
In 1803, William Wilberforce threw his weight behind compuslory vaccination for smallpox, declaring that those who refused it were endangering society. William Cobbett replied with an open letter, in which he wondered whether any Government could resist applying the same logic to every habit, preference or opinion they could label as a social menace.
Posted December 31 2024
10
Edith Nesbit brings down the curtain on ‘The Railway Children’.
Most novelists agonise over their opening line. Edith Nesbit’s opener for The Railway Children (1905) wasn’t bad, but her final page takes the breath away. You will recall that three suburban children have moved with their mother to a small cottage near a railway line, after some men took their well-to-do father away one night in a most cloak-and-dagger fashion.
Posted December 30 2024
11
In Russia, when a blind beggar is laid to rest even the Emperor knows for whom the bell tolls.
Olga Novikova came to London in 1868. In 1916, when she published Russian Memories, the Russians were our allies in the Great War, and our pro-German, anti-Russian politics of the last fifty years was looking a little stale. Novikova told us a touching anecdote of the late Emperor Nicholas I, whom we knew only as the Russian leader we had fought in the Crimean War of 1854-56.
Posted December 29 2024
12
Guiseppi Garibaldi treasured the memory of a visit to Tyneside.
In 1854, Guiseppi Garibaldi found himself an outcast across Europe for his campaign to unite Italy’s small states (some under foreign control) in a single country. He found friends in the US and on his return, his ship called into Newcastle-upon-Tyne for coal. Joseph Cowen Jr came aboard to present him with a ceremonial sword inscribed ‘To General Garibaldi, by the people of Tyneside, friends of European freedom’.
Posted December 27 2024