This edited article about Charles Dickens originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 705 published on 19 July 1975.

The charismatic novelist, Charles Dickens, gave dramatic readings which captivated his spellbound audiences. Picture by Neville Dear

The fashionably dressed audience applauded enthusiastically as the curtain went up. Most had paid heavily for their seats, some as much as £5, which was a lot of money in 1870. But none regretted it. It was money well spent to hear the great Charles Dickens reading from his own works.

Dickens stood there in the glare of the gas lights, a grey-haired, bearded man in a perfectly tailored evening suit with diamonds gleaming in his shirt front, but looking a good deal older than his 58 years. Then, as the house lights went down, Britain’s greatest living author began to speak. Within a few minutes, no fewer than thirty members of the audience had fainted.

It was not unusual. The medical attendants who set about rendering first aid had known what to expect as soon as they had read the programme. Even veterans of the Crimea were likely to feel distinctly queer when Charles Dickens read one of his bloodthirsty episodes, because he always made it sound even worse than the real thing.

Reading in public from his own work was something that Dickens started quite late in life.

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This edited article about Rudyard Kipling originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 700 published on 14 June 1975.

Kipling’s Mowgli and his faithful animal friends

A Great man once said that the most exciting years of our lives are those of our earliest childhood. Then, everything is new and strange; each day brings a fresh adventure. Because we live, at that age, so near to the ground, we see and hear things close to the earth. The memory of these things stays with us all our lives, often coming back very powerfully when we are old.

All this was undoubtedly true in the life of Rudyard Kipling. He spent his earliest years soaking up a childhood’s impressions of India, where he was born in 1865. For his first three years, he crawled or pottered about under its hot sun and tropical rain. He gazed at the waving palm trees and tall grasses, the riot of flowers, savouring the fragrance of lilies, orchids, dunghills and charcoal fires; he watched the darting lizards, the circling vultures and an occasional snake or mongoose. From the Indian servants of his home, he learned to prattle away in Hindustani, the common language of the markets and kitchens. From them also, he heard strange Indian folk-tales so different to the stories which the average English child first hears.

His curious name, ‘Rudyard’ was chosen by his godmother, because his parents had first met at a place called Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, where his father was a designer of pottery. His gifts as an artist and sculptor, together with a taste for adventure which his son certainly inherited, gained Rudyard’s father a job under the Government of India. He was sent to Bombay in the summer of 1865, with his wife Alice, whom he had married in the previous March. His task there was to revive the dying art of India’s artists and craftsmen, at the newly opened Bombay School of Art.

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This edited article about William Shakespeare originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

Shakespeare is caught poaching deer by Ron Embleton

There had been people with the name of Shakespeare in Warwickshire for centuries. Some villages contained several families of that name, so that when John Shakespeare from a village near Stratford married Mary Arden, a girl from neighbouring Wilmcote, nobody took much notice.

They even lost the register in which the couple signed their names, so that no one is certain where the marriage actually took place. John and Mary had four daughters and three sons. Of these, the eldest boy, William alone is remembered.

John Shakespeare preferred town life to that of the country. He took his bride to a house he already owned in Stratford-on-Avon. There, he carried on his trade as a glove-maker, but ran a few sidelines in raw hides, wool and leather, corn and malt. He even worked as a butcher, a trade in which his son William, was said to have some skill.

As his business prospered, John Shakespeare also rose in his duties for the town council. He began as the official ale tester in 1556. Ten years later he achieved the top job as bailiff, and applied for the grant of a coat of arms.

It was against this background of a busy market town, of which his father was a leading citizen, that young William Shakespeare grew up. No doubt he was proud of his father’s prosperity and popularity, and enjoyed meeting all sorts of people at the fine house occupied by his family near the town centre.

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This edited article about Penshurst originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 698 published on 31 May 1975.

Sir Philp Sidney, the great Elizabethan soldier-poet, was born at Penshurst, by Dan Escott

Penshurst was granted by Edward VI to Sir William Sidney, whose son, Sir Henry, a great Lord-deputy of Ireland and President of Wales, became brother-in-law of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and was father of Sir Philip Sidney. This famous Elizabethan courtier-poet-soldier, was born here in 1554.

Although its chief associations are with the Sidney family, the core of Penshurst is the Great Hall which was built in 1340 and has been perfectly preserved. The still older vaulted crypt is now an armoury while the fine state rooms and long gallery contain china, silver and portraits of rare interest.

Although they were never wealthy, the Sidneys added and adapted to Penshurst which has remained a notable and picturesque medieval mansion. The 1st Lord De L’Isle and Dudley, their descendant, reconstructed parts in 1834 and his son did much to preserve the fabric and restore the gardens to their Jacobean form.

This “noble pile” as the poet Ben Jonson described it, stands in its own park of 350 acres.

This edited article about William Brodie originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

William Brodie, the real-life Jekyll and Hyde

The young ladies in the drawing-room could not stop talking about the handsome and prosperous bachelor who was coming to tea.

“What a wonderful husband he would make,” they said to each other. “He’s bound to marry soon. I wonder which one of us it will be?”

“Quiet!” said the girl keeping lookout at the window. “He’s knocking at the front door now. He’s dressed all in white – just like a saint.”

And saintly was just how William Brodie appeared to the wealthy merchants he mixed with in Edinburgh society. A bachelor of temperate habits, a city councillor, a skilful cabinet-maker and carpenter, he seemed faultless. The only thing held against him was his shyness and modesty that made him a difficult person to really know.

“He’s certainly polite and charming,” the girls of Edinburgh would say to their mothers. “But he seems a little too perfect. It is as if he is trying to hide something from us.”

They little guessed then that William Brodie was hiding plenty from them. Just what it was emerged in 1788 when Brodie – then forty-eight and still unmarried – was tried and executed at Tolbooth Prison as the leader of a gang of vicious underworld burglars who had long terrorized the city.

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This edited article about Cumbria originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 696 published on 17 May 1975.

William Wordsworth at Dove Cottage by Harry Green

John Paul Jones, his cocked hat set firmly on his head, his sword swinging at his waist, ran up the companion way of his ship, “Ranger”, as it swept smoothly before the breeze into a quiet English harbour.

A number of British vessels were at anchor and Jones could just see them in the moonlight.

He rapped a sharp order to the gunners to prime their cannons and take aim. Suddenly, there was a succession of loud reports, and red flashes illuminated the ships gently straining at their anchors.

“Fire,” shouted Jones again. And once more the cannons boomed, their projectiles striking their targets squarely. Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, the ships burst into flames one by one, and the red glow lit up the guns of the shore battery.

At a command from Jones, the gunners switched their aim to the shore cannons and soon put them out of action.

By now, the whole town was aroused, and ships which had not been hit in the earlier attack began putting to sea. Realising that he was about to be very speedily outnumbered, Jones turned and ran – and peace once again returned to the quiet harbour.

Jones was an American privateer who created havoc around the coast of Britain during the American War of Independence. And this attack in 1778 was upon Whitehaven, a town upon the coast of Cumbria, a county created in April last year.

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This edited article about Sir Walter Raleigh originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 695 published on 10 May 1975.

The execution of Sir Walter Raleigh by Oliver Frey

A grey-headed man in his middle sixties climbed on to the scaffold, where the executioner waited with his axe. The victim limped from an old leg injury, sustained in fighting for his country. Far from jeering, the watching crowd pitied the man who had been a soldier and sailor for England, a poet, and explorer, a queen’s favourite, but also regrettably a king’s enemy. The man in question was Sir Walter Raleigh. For twelve years he had been in the Tower, under sentence of death for plotting against James I. Although released to command a fruitless expedition to America, he had returned in disgrace, to suffer the fate which had hung over him for so long.

As he stood there, perhaps his last thoughts were not of courts or battles, but of the Devon lanes where he had spent his boyhood, and the village church where he had knelt beside his father so long ago.

Walter Raleigh’s father married three times, and had two daughters and four sons by different wives. The youngest son he named Walter, after himself. The boy could claim kin with some famous names through his relations – the Drakes, for instance, the Grenvilles, and the Gilberts, all Devon men. These uncles, cousins, and half-brothers became the young Walter’s boyhood heroes, and he often met them in his family circle.

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This edited article about P G Wodehouse originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 692 published on 19 April 1975.

The Nazis arrested P G Wodehouse and, after releasing him from a prison camp, they effectively interned him in Germany for the duration of the war, by Roger Payne

His first comic creation was a character called Psmith, with the P silent, as in psalm, and one of his masterpieces of invention was the monumental Empress of Blandings. No, she was not a mighty ruler, but a prize pig, the pride and joy of that potty peer, the Earl of Emsworth.

For P. G. Wodehouse, who died in February of this year at the grand old age of 93, the clock stopped around 1900, even though some of his more recent characters travelled by jet. He created a timeless fairyland set somewhere in Shropshire, where he placed that noble pile of funny happenings, Blandings Castle.

Also in the fairyland was London, and especially, the Drones Club, inhabited by Eggs, Beans and Crumpets. (Young readers please note that it was quite common to address someone as “Old Bean” or “Old Egg” in not-so-distant days.)

The weather tended to be rather good in this fairyland, except for flashes of Summer Lightning, the title of one of his funniest books, and the loudest noise seemed to be “the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows”. Aunt Agatha was rather noisy, of course, but not the greatest of them all, Jeeves, butler extraordinary to Bertie Wooster.

What a pair! Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Yes, Wodehouse was in the big league, the lowbrow whom the highbrows, along with millions of others, adored. This most English of writers was even translated into Chinese and Japanese, and his early admirers included Kipling, H. G. Wells, and Hilaire Belloc, who called him the best living writer of English. Ordinary folk just laughed out loud.

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This edited article about Somerset Maugham originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 692 published on 19 April 1975.

W. Somerset Maugham

Born in Paris on January 25th, 1874, William Somerset Maugham was to become one of the most famous English writers of the twentieth century.

His father was solicitor at the British Embassy in Paris and young William learned to speak French before he spoke English.

An orphan before he was ten years old, he was brought up by a clergyman-uncle in Whitstable, Kent, and went to school at King’s School, Canterbury.

Maugham then went to continue his education at Heidelberg University in Germany, and returned to England to study medicine in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, for six years.

Although he spent a long time training to become a doctor, Maugham never practised his profession except as a student in the London slums, and it was from these experiences that he drew material for his novel, Liza of Lambeth, and for Of Human Bondage, which is considered his finest novel.

At first, Maugham was better known as a playwright than a novelist, though it was only after years of effort that he won success with his play Lady Frederick in 1907.

During the First World War, Maugham served with the Intelligence Department which gave him material for his famous spy story, Ashenden.

In 1915, he married a daughter of Dr. Thomas Barnardo, the man who devoted his life to the rescue of orphans and waifs.

Maugham’s fame as a short-story writer, at which he was an acknowledged master, began with The Trembling of a Leaf in 1921. Ten more collections of short stories followed.

His best known novels are The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, Cakes and Ale, The Razor’s Edge and Catalina.

Maugham was made a Companion of Honour in 1954, and died in 1965.

This edited article about Sussex originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 691 published on 12 April 1975.

The great Anglo-American novelist, Henry James, outside Lamb House in Rye, with inset showing the famous garden room where he wrote, by Harry Green

During the sunny summer days of the late eighteenth century the folk of the little fishing village of Brighthelmstone in Sussex gaped in amazement at crowds of ladies, gentlemen, and children from London who were suddenly thronging their pebble beaches.

Why had all these wealthy people come to the quaint Sussex village built on a crumbling cliff ledge? Neighbours told each other it was something to do with a new doctor from Lewes who had taken a house on the seafront.

The doctor had written a book in which he prescribed sea air and sea bathing as a cure for many illnesses. It was rumoured that even the Prince Regent was anxious to try the new cure.

Then, in 1783, George, the Prince Regent, suddenly arrived in Brighthelmstone. Every summer day he walked along the Steyne promenade with a crowd of friends.

Prince George liked the seaside air. He liked it so much that he built a palace a few yards from the sea, decorated with Indian domes, hangings, and Chinese dragons. Here he gave great banquets for his London friends.

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