Anon - "The Diary of a U boat Commander"

Leslie Stephen - "Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.)"

Hugh Walpole - "Fortitude"

St. George Stock - "Deductive Logic"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Victorian Worthies

G >> George Henry Blore >> Victorian Worthies




In some ways he was able to fill the place without great effort. He had
never been a respecter of persons; he had been quite indifferent
whether his decisions were approved by those about him, and had always
learnt to walk alone with a single eye to the public good. Also, he had
such vast store of knowledge of the land and its inhabitants as no
Viceroy before him for many decades. But the ceremonial fatigued him;
and the tradition of working 'in Council', as the Viceroy must, was
embarrassing to one who could always form a decision alone and had
learnt to trust his own judgement.

Many of Lawrence's best friends and most trusted colleagues had left
India, and he had, seated at his Council board, others who did not share
his views, and who opposed the measures that he advocated. Especially
was this true of the distinguished soldier Sir Hugh Rose; and Lawrence
had to endure the same strain as in 1850, in the days of the Punjab
board. But he was able to do great service to the country in many ways,
and especially to the agricultural classes by pushing forward large
schemes of irrigation. Finance was one of his strong points, and any
expenditure which would be reproductive was sure of his support owing to
his care for the peasants and his love of a sound budget. The period of
his Viceroyalty was what is generally called uneventful--that is, it was
chiefly given up to such schemes as promoted peace and prosperity, and
did not witness any extension of our dominions. Even when Robert
Napier's[19] expedition went to Abyssinia, few people in England
realized that it was organized in India and paid for by India; and the
credit for its success was given elsewhere.

[Note 19: Created Lord Napier of Magdala after storming King
Theodore's fortress in 1868.]

But it is necessary to refer to one great subject of controversy, which
was prominent all through Lawrence's career and with which his name is
associated. This is the 'Frontier Policy' and the treatment of
Afgh[=a]nist[=a]n, on which two distinct schools of thought emerged.
One school, ever jealous of the Russian advance, maintained that our
Indian Government should establish agencies in Afgh[=a]nist[=a]n with or
without the consent of the Am[=i]r; that it should interfere, if need
be, to secure the throne for a prince who was attached to us; that
British troops should be stationed beyond the Indus, where they could
make their influence felt beyond our borders. The other maintained that
our best policy was to keep within our natural boundaries, and in this
respect the Indus with its fringe of desert was second only to the high
mountain chains; that we should recognize the wild love of independence
which the Afgh[=a]ns felt, that we should undertake no obligations
towards the Am[=i]r except to observe the boundaries between him and us.
If the Russians threatened our territories through Afgh[=a]nist[=a]n,
the natives would help us from hatred of the invaders; but if we began
to establish agents and troops in their towns, we should ourselves
become to them the hated enemy.

One school said that the Afgh[=a]ns respected strength and would support
us, if we seemed capable of a vigorous policy. The other replied that
they resented foreign intrusion and would oppose Great Britain or
Russia, if either attempted it. One said that we ought to have a
resident in K[=a]bul and Kandah[=a]r, the other said that it was a pity
that we had ever occupied Pesh[=a]war, in its exposed valley at the foot
of the Khyber Pass, and that Attock, where the Indus was bridged, was
the ideal frontier post.

No one doubted that Lawrence would be found on the side of the less
showy and less costly policy; and he kept unswervingly true to his
ideal. The verdict of history must not be claimed too confidently in a
land which has seen so many races come and go. At least it may be said
that the men who advocated advance were unable to make it good. Few
chapters in our history are more tragic than the Afgh[=a]n Wars of
1838-42 and 1878-80, though the last was redeemed by General Roberts's
great achievements. Our present policy is in accord with this verdict.
There is to-day no British agency at K[=a]bul or Kandah[=a]r; and the
loyalty of the Am[=i]rs, during some forty years of faithful adherence
on our part to this policy, have been sufficiently firm to justify
Lawrence's opposition to the Forward Policy. To-day it seems easy to
vindicate his wisdom; but in 1878, when the Conservative Government
kindled the war fever and allowed Lord Lytton to initiate a new
adventure, it was not easy to stem the tide, and Lawrence came in for
much abuse and unpopularity in maintaining the other view.

But long before this happened he had returned to England. His term of
office was over early in 1869, and his work in India was finished. His
last years at home were quiet, but not inactive. In 1870 he was invited
to become the first chairman of the new School Board for London, and he
held this office three years. Board work was always uncongenial to him,
and the subject was, of course, unfamiliar; but he gave his best efforts
to the cause and did other voluntary work in London. This came to an end
in 1876, when his eyesight failed, and for nearly two years he had much
suffering and was in danger of total blindness for a time. A second
operation saved him from this, and in 1878 he put forth his strength in
writing and speaking vigorously, but without success, against Lord
Lytton's Afgh[=a]n War. In June, 1879, he was stricken with sudden
illness, and died a week later in his seventieth year. It was hardly to
be expected that one who had spent himself so freely, amid such stirring
events, should live beyond the Psalmist's span of life.

He had started at the bottom of the official ladder; by his own efforts
he had won his way to the top; and his career will always be a notable
example to those young Englishmen who cross the sea to serve the Empire
in our great Dependency with its 300 million inhabitants. How the
relations between India and Great Britain will develop--how long the
connexion will last may be debated by politicians and authors; it is in
careers like that of John Lawrence (and there were many such in the
nineteenth century) that the noblest fruit of the connexion may be
seen.




JOHN BRIGHT

1811-89


1811. Born at Greenbank, Rochdale, November 16.
1827. Leaves school. Enters his father's mill.
1839. Marries Elizabeth Priestman (died 1841).
1841. Joins Cobden in constitutional agitation for Repeal of Corn Laws.
1843. Enters Parliament as Member for Durham.
1846. Corn Laws repealed.
1847. Marries Margaret Leatham (died 1878).
1847. Member for Manchester.
1854-5. Opposes Crimean War.
1856-7. Long illness.
1857. Unseated for Manchester. Member for Birmingham.
1861. Supports the North in American Civil War.
1868. President of Board of Trade in Gladstone's first Government.
1870. Second long illness.
1880. Chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster in Gladstone's second Government.
1882. Resigns office over bombardment of Alexandria.
1886. Opposes Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill.
1889. Dies at Rochdale, March 29.

JOHN BRIGHT

TRIBUNE


The word 'tribune' comes to us from the early days of the Roman
Republic; and even in Rome the tribunate was unlike all other
magistracies. The holder had no outward signs of office, no satellites
to execute his commands, no definite department to administer like the
consul or the praetor. It was his first function to protest on behalf of
the poorer citizens against the violent exercise of authority, and, on
certain occasions, to thwart the action of other magistrates. He was to
be the champion of the weak and helpless against the privileged orders;
and his power depended on his courage, his eloquence, and the
prestige of his office. England has no office of the sort in her
constitutional armoury; but the word 'tribune' expresses, better than
any other title, the position occupied in our political life by many of
the men who have been the conspicuous champions of liberty, and few
would contest the claim of John Bright to a foremost place among them.
He, too, stood forth to vindicate the rights of the _plebs_; he, too,
resisted the will of governments; and in no common measure did he give
evidence, through forty years of public life, of the possession of the
highest eloquence and the highest courage.

[Illustration: JOHN BRIGHT

From the painting by W. W. Ouless in the National Portrait Gallery]

His early life gave little promise of a great career. He was born in
1811, the son of Jacob Bright, of Rochdale, who had risen by his own
efforts to the ownership of a small cotton-mill in Lancashire, a man of
simple benevolence and genuine piety, and a member of the Society of
Friends--a society more familiar to us under the name of Quakers, though
this name is not employed by them in speaking of themselves.

The boy left home early, and between the ages of eight and fifteen he
was successively a pupil at five Quaker schools in the north of England.
Here he enjoyed little comfort, and none of the aristocratic seclusion
in which most statesmen have been reared at Eton and Harrow. He rubbed
shoulders with boys of various degrees of rank and wealth, and learnt to
be simple, true, and serious-minded; but he was in no way remarkable at
this age. We hear little of his recreations, and still less of his
reading; the school which pleased him most and did him most good was the
one which he attended last, lying among the moors on the borders of
Lancashire and Yorkshire. In the river Hodder he learnt to swim; still
more he learnt to fish, and it was fishing which remained his favourite
outdoor pastime throughout his life.

When school-days were over--at the age of fifteen--there was no question
of the University: a rigorous life awaited him and he began at once to
work in his father's business. The mill stood close beside his father's
house at Greenbank near Rochdale, some ten miles northward from
Manchester, and had been built in 1809 by Jacob Bright, out of a capital
lent to him by two members of the Society of Friends. Here he received
bales of new cotton by canal or from carriers, span it in his mill, and
gave out the warp and weft thus manufactured to handloom weavers, whom
he paid by the piece to weave it in the weaving chamber at the top of
their own houses. He then sold the fully manufactured article in
Manchester or elsewhere. In such surroundings, many a clever boy has
developed into a hard-headed prosperous business man; material interests
have cased in his soul, and he has been content to limit his thoughts to
buying and selling, to the affairs of his factory and his town, and he
has heard no call to other fields of work. But John Bright's education
in books and in life was only just beginning, and though it may be
regrettable that he missed the leisured freedom of university life, we
must own that he really made good the loss by his own effort (and that
without neglecting the work of the mill), and thereby did much to
strengthen the independence of his character.

In the mill he was the earliest riser, and often spent hours before
breakfast at his books. History and poetry were his favourite reading,
and periodicals dealing with social and political questions; his taste
was severe and had the happiest effect in chastening his oratorical
style. To him, as to the earnest Puritans of the seventeenth century,
the Bible and Milton were a peculiar joy; no other stories were so
moving, no other music so thrilling to the ear. In his family there was
no want of good talk. His mother, who died in 1830, was a woman of great
gifts, who helped largely in developing the minds of her children.
After her death John continued to live with his sisters, who were clever
and original in mind, becoming the leader in the home circle, where
views were freely exchanged on the questions of the day.

The Society of Friends was adverse to political discussion, as
interfering with the religious life. But the Brights could not be kept
from such a field of interest; and during these years theirs, like many
other quiet homes, was stirred by the excitement roused by the fortunes
of the Reform Bill.

The mill, too, did much to educate him. In the Rochdale factory there
was no marked separation as at Manchester between rich and poor. Master
and men lived side by side, knew one another's family history and
fortunes, and fraternized over their joys and sorrows. Even in those
days of backward education 'Old Jacob' made himself responsible for the
schooling of his workmen's children; his son, too, made personal friends
among those working under him and kept them throughout his life. Outside
the mill Rochdale offered opportunities which he readily took. In 1833
he became one of the founders and first president of a debating society,
and he began early to address Bible meetings and to lecture on
temperance in his native town, moved by no conscious idea of learning to
speak in public, but by the simple desire to be useful in good work. In
such holidays as he took he was eager to travel abroad and to learn more
of the outside world, and before he started at the age of twenty-four on
his longest travels (a nine months' journey to Palestine and the eastern
Mediterranean) he had, by individual effort, fitted himself to hold his
own with the best students of the universities in width of outlook and
capacity for mastering a subject. Like them, he had his limitations and
his prejudices; but however we may admire wide toleration in itself,
depth and intensity of feeling are often of more value to a man in
enabling him to influence his fellows.

The year of Queen Victoria's accession may be counted a landmark in the
life of this great Victorian. Then for the first time he met Richard
Cobden, who was destined to extend his labours and to share his glory;
and in the following year he began to co-operate actively in the Free
Trade cause, attending meetings in the Rochdale district and gradually
developing his power of speaking. It was about this time that he came to
know his first wife, Elizabeth Priestman, of the Society of Friends, in
Newcastle-on-Tyne, a woman of refined nature and rare gifts, whom he was
to marry in 1839 and to lose in 1841. Then it was that he built the
house 'One Ash', facing the same common as the house in which he was
born. Here he lived many years, and here he died in the fullness of
time, a Lancashire man, content to dwell among his own people, in his
native town, and to forgo the grandeur of a country house. It was from
here that he was called in the decisive hour of his life to take part in
a national work with which his name will ever be associated. At the
moment when Bright was prostrated with grief at his wife's death Cobden
appeared on the scene and made his historic appeal. He urged his friend
to put aside his private grief, to remember the miseries of so many
other homes, miseries due directly to the Corn Laws, to put his shoulder
to the wheel, and never to rest till they were repealed.

Cobden had been less happy than Bright in his schooling. His father's
misfortune led to his spending five years at a Yorkshire school of the
worst type, and seven more as clerk in the warehouse of an unsympathetic
uncle. Like Bright, he had early to take the lead in his own family;
also, like Bright, he had to educate himself; but he had a far harder
struggle, and the enterprise which he showed in commerce in early
manhood would have left him the possessor of a vast fortune, had he not
preferred to devote his energies to public causes. The two men were by
nature well suited to complement one another. If Cobden was the more
ingenious in explaining an argument, Bright was more forcible in
asserting a principle. If Cobden could, above all other men, convince
the intellects of his hearers, Bright could, as few other speakers,
kindle their spirits for a fray. His figure on a platform was striking.
His manly expressive face, with broad brow, straight nose, and square
chin, was essentially English in type. Though in the course of his
political career he discarded the distinctive Quaker dress, he never
discarded the Quaker simplicity. His costume was plain, his style of
speaking severe, his bearing dignified and restrained. Only when his
indignation was kindled at injustice was he swept far away from the
calmness of Quaker tradition.

The Corn Laws were a sequel to the Napoleonic wars and to the insecurity
of foreign trade which these caused. While war lasted it had inflated
prices, and brought to English growers of corn a period of extraordinary
prosperity. When peace came, to escape from a sudden fall in prices, the
landed proprietors, who formed a majority of the House of Commons, had
fixed by Act of Parliament the conditions under which corn might be
imported from abroad. This measure was to perpetuate by law, in time of
peace, the artificial conditions from which the people had unavoidably
suffered by the accident of war. The legislators paid no heed to the
growth of population, which was enormous, or to the distress of the
working classes, who needed time to adjust themselves to the rapid
changes in industry. Even the middle classes suffered, and the poor
could only meet such trouble by 'clemming' or self-starvation. A noble
duke, speaking in all good faith, advised them to 'try a pinch of curry
powder in hot water', as making the pangs of hunger less intolerable.
He met with little thanks for his advice from the sufferers, who
demanded a radical cure. Parliament as a whole showed few signs of
wishing to probe the question more deeply, and shut its eyes to the
evidence of distress, whether shown in peaceful petitions or in
disorderly riots. Many of the members were personally humane men and
good landlords; but there were no powerful newspapers to enlighten them,
and they knew little of the state of the manufacturing districts.

The cause had now found its appropriate champions. We in this day are
familiar with appeals to the great mass of the people: we know the story
of Midlothian campaigns and Belfast reviews; we hear the distant thunder
from Liverpool, Manchester, or Birmingham, when the great men of
Parliament go down from London to thrill vast audiences in the
provincial towns. But the agitation of the Anti-Corn-Law League was a
new thing. It was initiated by men unknown outside the Manchester
district; few of the thousands to whom it was directed possessed the
vote; and yet it wrought one of the greatest changes of the nineteenth
century, a change of which the influence is perhaps not yet spent. In
this campaign, Cobden and Bright were, without doubt, the leading
spirits.

The movement filled five years of Bright's life. His hopes and fears
might alternate--at one moment he was stirred to exultation over
success, at another to regrets at the break-up of his home life, at
another to bitter complaints and hatred of the landed interest--but his
exertions never relaxed. As he was so often absent, the business at
Rochdale had to be entrusted to his brother. Whenever he could be there,
Bright was at his home with his little motherless daughter; but his
efforts on the platform were more and more appreciated each year, and
the campaign made heavy demands upon him.

At the opening of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, on the site of the
'Peterloo' riots, he won a signal triumph. The vast audience was
enthusiastic: several of them also were discriminating in their praise.
One lady said that the chief charm of Mr. Bright was in the simplicity
of his manner, the total absence of anything like showing off; another
that she should never attend another meeting if he were announced to
speak, as she could not bear the excitement. Simplicity and profound
emotion were the secrets of his influence. The London Opera House saw
similar scenes once a month, from 1843 till the end of the struggle.
Villages and towns, and all classes of society, were instructed in the
principles of the League and induced to help forward the cause. Not only
did the wealthy factory owner, conscious as he was of the loss which the
high price of food inflicted on the manufacturing interest, contribute
his thousands; the factory hand too contributed his mite to further the
welfare of his class. Even farmers were led to take a new view of the
needs of agriculture, and the country labourer was made to see that his
advantage lay in the success of the League. It was a farm-hand who put
the matter in a nutshell at one of the meetings: 'I be protected,' he
said, 'and I be starving.'

In 1843 Bright joined his leader in Parliament as member for Durham
city, though his Quaker relatives disapproved of the idea that one of
their society should so far enter the world and take part in its
conflicts. In the House of Commons he met with scant popularity but with
general respect. He was no mob orator of the conventional type. The
simplicity and good taste of his speeches satisfied the best judges. He
expressed sentiments hateful to his hearers in such a way that they
might dislike the speech, but could not despise the speaker. Even when
he boldly attacked the Game Laws in an assembly of landowners, the House
listened to him respectfully, and the spokesman of the Government
thanked him for the tone and temper of his speech, admitting that he had
made out a strong case. But it was in the country and on the platform
that the chief efforts of Cobden and Bright were made, and their chief
successes won.

In 1845 they had an unexpected but most influential ally. Nature herself
took a hand in the game. From 1842 to 1844 the bad effects of the Corn
Laws were mitigated by good harvests and by the wise measures of Peel in
freeing trade from various restrictions. But in 1845 first the corn, and
then the potato crop, failed calamitously. Peel's conscience had been
uneasy for years: he had been studying economics, and his conclusions
did not square with the orthodox Tory creed. So when the Whig leader,
Lord John Russell, ventured to express himself openly for Free Trade in
his famous Edinburgh letter of November 28, Peel at last saw some chance
of converting his party. It has already been told in this book how at
length he succeeded in his aims, how he broke up his party but saved the
country, and how in the hour of mingled triumph and defeat he generously
gave to Cobden the chief credit for success. Whigs and Tories might
taunt one another with desertion of principles, or might claim that
their respective leaders collaborated at the end; certainly the question
would never have been put before the Cabinet or the House of Commons as
a Government measure but for the untiring efforts of the two Tribunes.
History can show few greater triumphs of Government by moral suasion and
the art of speech. Throughout, violence had been eschewed, even though
men were starving, and appeals had been made solely to the justice and
expediency of their case. Nothing illustrates better the sincerity and
disinterestedness of John Bright than his conduct in these last decisive
months. The tide was flowing with him; the opposition was reduced to a
shadow. He might have enjoyed the luxury of applause from Radicals,
Whigs, and the more advanced Tories, and won easy victories over a
hostile minority. But the cause was now in the safe hands of Peel, whose
honesty they respected and whose generalship they trusted; so Cobden and
Bright were content to stand aside and watch. Instead of carping at his
tardy conversion, Bright wrote in generous praise of Peel's speech: 'I
never listened', he said, 'to any human being speaking in public with so
much delight.' His heart was in the cause and not in his own
advancement. When he did rise to speak, it was to vindicate Peel's
honour and his statesmanship.

A few months later this honourable alliance came to an abrupt end.
Bright was forced, by the same incorruptible sense of right and by the
absence of all respect of persons, to oppose Peel in the crisis of his
fate. The Government brought in an Irish Coercion Bill, which was
naturally opposed by the Whigs. The Protectionist Tories saw their
chance of taking revenge on Peel for repealing the Corn Laws and made
common cause with their enemies; and from very different motives, Bright
went into the same lobby. His conscience forbade him to support any
coercive measure. No Prime Minister could please him as much as Peel;
but no surrender, no mere evasion of responsibilities was possible in
the case of a measure of which he disapproved. So firm was the bed-rock
of principle on which Bright's political conduct was based; and it was
to this uncompromising sincerity above all that he owed the triumphs of
his oratory.

His method as an orator is full of interest.[20] In his youth he had
begun by writing out and learning his speeches in full; but, before he
quitted Rochdale for a wider theatre, he had discarded this rather
mechanical method, and trusted more freely to his growing powers. He
still made careful preparation for his speeches. He tells us how he
often composed them in bed, as Carlyle's 'rugged Brindley' wrestled in
bed with the difficulties of his canal-schemes, the silence and the dim
light favouring the birth of ideas. He prepared words as well as ideas;
but he only committed to memory enough to be a guide to him in marking
the order and development of his thoughts, and filled up the original
outline according to the inspiration of the moment. A few sentences,
where the balance of words was carefully studied; a few figures of
speech, where his imagination had taken flight into the realm of poetry;
a few notable illustrations from history or contemporary politics, with
details of names and figures,--these would be found among the notes
which he wrote on detached slips of paper and dropped successively into
his hat as each milestone was attained. As compared with his illustrious
rival Gladstone, he was very sparing of gesture, depending partly on
facial expression, still more on the modulations of his voice, to give
life to the words which he uttered. His reading had formed his diction,
his constant speaking had taught him readiness, and his study of great
questions at close quarters and his meditation on them supplied him with
the facts and the conclusions which he wished to put forward; but the
fire which kindled this material to white heat was the passion for great
principles which glowed in his heart. He himself in 1868, in returning
thanks for the gift of the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh, quoted with
obvious sincerity a sentence from his favourite Milton: 'True eloquence
I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of Truth.'

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