121
Silas Marner, the weaver, plans to take a comforting look at his savings while he eats his dinner.
Silas Marner, the weaver, lives a reclusive life now, following an unhappy episode when he was framed for stealing. One night, while waiting for his supper to cook (a nice bit of pork, a gift or he would not have indulged himself) he decides to fetch his savings from their secret place beneath the floor, and enjoy the sight of them as he eats.
Posted October 2 2023
122
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.
Posted September 28 2023
123
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.
Posted September 26 2023
124
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.
Posted September 24 2023
125
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’.
Posted September 22 2023
126
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.
Posted September 19 2023