Extracts from Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Fiction’
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.
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.
On his first night in a school dorm, Arthur dared not do anything without seeking approval — with one exception.
Dr Thomas Arnold, the (real life) headmaster of Rugby School, has decided that it would settle Tom Brown down to be given some responsibility; so he has asked Tom to take a rather delicate new boy, thirteen-year-old Arthur, under his wing. Tom is called to action from Arthur’s first night in the dormitory.
On the same day in 1537, so the story goes, two baby boys were born, but the similarity between them ended there.
In 1527, courtiers began to whisper of Henry VIII’s rising obsession with finding a male heir, calling it the King’s ‘Great Matter’. After Queen Catherine had been put away, and Queen Anne had been beheaded, his prayers were answered when in 1537, Queen Jane bore him a son, Prince Edward. It was against this historical background that Mark Twain opened the tale of The Prince and the Pauper, published in 1881.
Benjamin Disraeli revealed the secret behind holding one’s place at the top of Parisian society.
In February 1860 the new Cobden-Chevalier treaty was announced, a breakthrough free-trade deal with France, and a new era in Anglo-French relations. An especially vocal opponent of it was MP and novelist Benjamin Disraeli; so when John Bright rose in the Commons and read aloud this passage from Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844), he drew a good deal of laughter.
The animals in the jungle agree that amidst the drought, the sport of hunter and hunted has to be suspended.
In Rudyard Kipling’s story The Jungle Book, a prolonged drought has left Mowgli and the animals with no food and little water. The waterhole has sunk so low that the Peace Rock is showing, and Hathi, the elephant, has called the Water Truce so hunter and hunted alike can drink. As dusk falls, the truce is holding — though Bagheera, the black panther, isn’t much help.