127
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.
Posted September 13 2023
128
Like the ideal Christian, the ideal teacher is one who spreads joy in everything, great or small.
Alexander Haddow, who taught at Jordanhill College of Education, Glasgow, between the wars, was known for his conviction that poetry-reading must bring joy or it must not be attempted. “I would have only those who wish to read, try,” he said, “and I would have you deal gently with all who really try.” In On the Teaching of Poetry (1925) Haddow went so far as to liken the vocation of the teacher to that of the Christian.
Posted September 12 2023
129
A charming children’s rhyme that is also a test of the clearest speaker’s diction.
Sir Edward Abbott Parry had recently been appointed one of her majesty Queen Victoria’s judges when he published Katawampus (1895), a book of tales and rhymes for young children. It all began, it seems, when Pater (Latin for father), in despair over his fractious children, took a Christmas Day dip in the sea... but before telling that extraordinary story, Pater gave these little verses from his ‘book of rhymes’.
Posted September 12 2023
130
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.
Posted September 10 2023
131
Samuel Pepys ran into a little knot of seafaring men at the Exchange, who told him some hair-raising tales about their time in Algiers.
On February 8th, 1661, Samuel Pepys, a civil servant with the Royal Navy, popped over to the Exchange to meet William Warren, who supplied wood for the nation’s warships. Warren was unavailable, but the convivial Pepys invited some Naval officers to the nearby Golden Fleece tavern, where he listened open-mouthed to their recollections of life in the slave compounds of Algiers.
Posted August 27 2023
132
When Rhoda, maid to John Mark and his mother, said Peter was standing at the gate, nobody in the house believed her.
St Peter was imprisoned during the purge of Christians ordered by Herod Agrippa in AD 44, during which St James, brother of St John the Evangelist, was executed. Peter’s miraculous jailbreak is a tale into which another evangelist, St Mark, also comes; but the star of Luke’s superbly crafted account is Rhoda, the scatterbrained maid.
Posted July 13 2023