Wednesday, 24 December 2025
William Gladstone
In his diary entry dated 23 December 1895, William Gladstone referred to his funding of the St Deiniol's Library in Hawarden, Flintshire. It is now known as Gladstone's Library.
Gladstone's local interest stemmed from his marriage to Catherine Glynne whose ancestral home was Hawarden Castle, which the couple inherited on the death of Catherine's brother Stephen. It is recorded that Gladstone donated over £41,000 (the equivalent today of £4.2 million) and also most of his own collection of 32,000 books,which he wheelbarrowed to the new library himself, despite being 85 years of age.
The library which specialises in arts and humanities is believed to be the world's only residential library and is a Grade I listed building.
Thursday, 18 December 2025
Auguries of Innocence
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thr’ all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State
A Horse misusd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing
The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight
Does the Rising Sun affright
Every Wolfs & Lions howl
Raises from Hell a Human Soul
The wild deer, wandring here & there
Keeps the Human Soul from Care
The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife
And yet forgives the Butchers knife
The Bat that flits at close of Eve
Has left the Brain that wont Believe
The Owl that calls upon the Night
Speaks the Unbelievers fright
He who shall hurt the little Wren
Shall never be belovd by Men
He who the Ox to wrath has movd
Shall never be by Woman lovd
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spiders enmity
He who torments the Chafers Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless Night
The Catterpiller on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh
He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar
The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat
Feed them & thou wilt grow fat
The Gnat that sings his Summers Song
Poison gets from Slanders tongue
The poison of the Snake & Newt
Is the sweat of Envys Foot
The poison of the Honey Bee
Is the Artists Jealousy
The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags
Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags
A Truth thats told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
The Babe is more than swadling Bands
Throughout all these Human Lands
Tools were made & Born were hands
Every Farmer Understands
Every Tear from Every Eye
Becomes a Babe in Eternity
This is caught by Females bright
And returnd to its own delight
The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar
Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore
The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath
Writes Revenge in realms of Death
The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air
Does to Rags the Heavens tear
The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun
Palsied strikes the Summers Sun
The poor Mans Farthing is worth more
Than all the Gold on Africs Shore
One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands
Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands
Or if protected from on high
Does that whole Nation sell & buy
He who mocks the Infants Faith
Shall be mockd in Age & Death
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall neer get out
He who respects the Infants faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death
The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons
Are the Fruits of the Two seasons
The Questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to Reply
He who replies to words of Doubt
Doth put the Light of Knowledge out
The Strongest Poison ever known
Came from Caesars Laurel Crown
Nought can Deform the Human Race
Like to the Armours iron brace
When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow
To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow
A Riddle or the Crickets Cry
Is to Doubt a fit Reply
The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile
Make Lame Philosophy to smile
He who Doubts from what he sees
Will neer Believe do what you Please
If the Sun & Moon should Doubt
Theyd immediately Go out
To be in a Passion you Good may Do
But no Good if a Passion is in you
The Whore & Gambler by the State
Licencd build that Nations Fate
The Harlots cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet
The Winners Shout the Losers Curse
Dance before dead Englands Hearse
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day
The Mark Twain House Library
The Mark Twain House Library holds a collection of about sixteen thousand objects, along with an archive of more than six thousand documents and over five thousand photographs linked to Mark Twain, his family, friends and the museum itself. Its materials include books Twain owned or annotated, original manuscripts, letters and Hartford-era photographs, early images and film items, and records documenting the design, construction and restoration of the Hartford house.
@themarktwainhouse, 351 Farmington Ave, Hartford, CT 06105, United States
Agatha Christie
She was 40, divorced, and famous. He was 26 and digging in the Iraqi desert. When he proposed, she said no—for two hours. Then she changed the world's mind about love.
March 1930. The ancient city of Ur, in what is now Iraq—the cradle of civilization. Agatha Christie, already one of the world's most famous mystery writers, stood among the ruins of Mesopotamia, trying to piece herself back together.
Four years earlier, her first husband had asked for a divorce. The scandal that followed nearly destroyed her—she disappeared for 11 days, found in a hotel under an assumed name, claiming amnesia. The tabloids had a field day. Her life became the mystery everyone wanted to solve.
Now, at 40, she'd traveled alone to Baghdad seeking escape, sunshine, and perhaps peace among artifacts that had survived millennia longer than any marriage.
That's where she met Max Mallowan.
He was 26 years old, Leonard Woolley's assistant on the dig, assigned to give tours to visiting guests. Young, charming, passionate about his work. He showed Agatha around the excavation site, explaining the pottery shards and ancient ivories with an enthusiasm that made 4,000-year-old civilizations feel alive.
They talked about archaeology, literature, history. She was fascinated by his work. He was captivated by her wit and intelligence. Age seemed irrelevant when they were standing in the shadow of ziggurats that predated them both by millennia.
When the dig season ended, Max visited Agatha and her daughter Rosalind in Devon. On his second night at her home, during a walk through the rainy Devon moors, he proposed.
Agatha immediately said no.
They argued for two hours.
The age difference terrified her. She was 40—nearly middle-aged by 1930s standards. He was 26, at the beginning of his career. She was a famous, divorced mother. He was an up-and-coming archaeologist with his whole life ahead of him.
"It won't work," she insisted. "People will talk. You'll regret it. I'm too old."
But Max wouldn't be swayed. He didn't care about the 14-year age gap. He didn't care what society thought. He saw her—brilliant, creative, adventurous—and he knew.
Agatha's sister Madge was firmly against the marriage. Her daughter Rosalind and secretary Carlo supported it. Family debated. Society would certainly judge.
But somewhere in that two-hour argument on the Devon moors, Agatha made a decision that would define the rest of her life: She chose happiness over fear.
In September 1930, just six months after they met, Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan married.
The world raised its eyebrows. Whispered. Gossiped. "She's too old." "He's too young." "It won't last."
They proved everyone wrong—for 46 years.
Their marriage became one of the most extraordinary partnerships in literary and archaeological history. Every autumn and spring, they traveled to the Middle East for excavations. Agatha served as the official photographer on every dig, developing prints herself in makeshift darkrooms. She discovered she had a gift for restoring pottery—piecing together fragments thousands of years old with infinite patience.
Max later wrote: "Agatha's controlled imagination came to our aid" in preserving delicate artifacts. She famously used her Innoxa face cream to clean ancient ivories, complaining "there was such a run on my face cream that there was nothing left for my poor old face!"
But their partnership went deeper than archaeology.
When separated by World War II, they wrote letters every day. She told him she missed him with "a kind of corkscrew feeling." He said he missed her with "a sort of emptiness, like being hungry."
He shared his theories. She ran plot ideas past him. They argued about theatre, literature, and geological formations. They were intellectual equals, creative partners, best friends.
During these Middle Eastern adventures, Agatha wrote some of her greatest works: Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), Appointment with Death (1938), and Murder in Mesopotamia, where anyone familiar with the Woolleys could guess which characters were based on whom.
She described their marriage as "like parallel railway tracks—each needing the other near, never converging." Two separate but essential lines, running side by side toward the same destination.
Max became one of the eminent archaeologists of his generation. In 1968, he was knighted for his contributions to archaeology. Agatha was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Sir Max and Dame Agatha—a partnership built on mutual respect, shared passion, and genuine love.
In his memoirs, Max wrote: "Few men know what it is to live in harmony beside an imaginative, creative mind which inspires life with zest."
When Agatha Christie died on January 12, 1976, at age 85, she had lived a full, extraordinary life. She'd written 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and the world's longest-running play. She'd traveled the world, discovered ancient civilizations, and created characters
Thursday, 11 December 2025
The Robin at Christmas
Many allegedly ancient traditions, beliefs and folk songs originated not in the Celtic past, but in the Victorian era. For example, the notion of the robin (Erithacus rubecula) as a feathery little bundle of winter solstice symbolism, red breast mirroring the sun in the dark winter months, is the kind of wishful thinking that longs for John Barleycorn and Hunting the Wren to be pre-Christian death and resurrection rituals. The robin is now synonymous with Christmas, but that’s a gift from the Victorians rather than the woad-daubed Celts. (Indeed, the very notion of a coherent Celtic past was itself a Victorian construct.) The Christmas-robin origin story is pleasingly festive, but not very pagan. Victorian postmen wore red jackets, giving them the nickname Redbreasts or Robins. On early Christmas cards (the first of which appeared in the mid-1840s), the Redbreast Posties were shown delivering Christmas cheer. In the 1880s, card artists roped in the namesake robin, which was often depicted perched on a red post box with a card clamped in its beak or claws. They’ve been a seasonal staple ever since. The little bird was an appealing subject for Victorian Christmas card designers, and robins delivering Christmas cards have long since replaced images of overworked and underpaid Victorian postmen, joining carol singers, snowscapes, sleighs, carriages, snowmen, and Father Christmases as Christmas card must-haves. But before all the neo-pagans desert this Substack in disgust, I should hastily add that there are many older traditions concerning robins, and their conspicuous presence in winter would have made them a natural subject for Christmas cards, even with the help of the postman. The bird has always been regarded with affection due to a combination of its lively, pugnacious behaviour (fuelled by a metabolism that gives it an astonishing 1,000 heartbeats per minute), its ball-like, toy-like shape when fluffed out in the winter, and its insistence on singing during the cold months when most other birds are sulking in silence. Author Emily Brontë called this song “wildly tender” in an 1837 poem:
Robins also appear in painted winter scenes from earlier centuries, their splash of red adding a dash of life and colour – like holly berries – to an otherwise grey or snow-washed world. So, it’s truer to say that the Victorians cemented the association on their Redbreast Christmas cards rather than created the association from scratch. The macho robinAffection for the robin, and its nature as a wild but relatable woodland spirit, seem at first glance to be captured in the names Robin Hood and Robin Goodfellow. However, it is not clear which came first, the folkloric figures or the bird’s name. Robin Hood is first named in William Langland’s poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, written around 1377, and Robin Goodfellow was first referenced by William Paston in 1489. In both cases, it’s likely that the authors were drawing the names from an older tradition. So, if I had to bet, I would say the names of the folkloric figures predate the name of the bird.
Which Robin came first?Before the 15th century, the robin was called either redbreast or ruddock (from the Old English ruddoc, a reference to the bird’s red or ruddy breast). ‘Robin’ and ‘Robinet’ were added as diminutives of the name Robert, at the same time as the wren became Jenny wren, the daw became Jackdaw, the pie became Magpie (as in Margaret), the tit became Tom tit, and the sparrow became Philip sparrow (the latter originating in a 1508 poem by John Skelton). The robin was firmly associated with a male persona at this time, just as the wren was archetypically female. There is perhaps a streak of sexism in this, arising from Christian folklore that says the treacherous wren sang her song (famously loud) and betrayed St Stephen’s hiding place (or, in some versions, Jesus’ hiding place). In contrast, the faithful robin visited a lowly cattle shed in the hours following Jesus’ birth. The fire had burned low, so the robin fanned it with his wings, resurrecting the flames and burning his breast in the process. In an alternative origins story, the robin tried to remove the nails from Jesus’ hands after the crucifixion, staining its breast red with blood. There are other versions of the fable. The robin burned his breast after taking water to Hell to relieve its suffering inmates. It is also said that the wren and the robin teamed up to bring fire, Prometheus-like, to humans. The poor wren burst into flames from the heat of the burden, and the robin swooped in to douse the flames, receiving its red breast in the process. The notion of the compassionate robin is further evident in the ballad Babes in the Wood, which first appeared in 1596 and is still sung in folk song circles. Here, the robin covers the bodies of the unfortunate babes with leaves and sings a song of mourning. Similarly, John Webster wrote in The White Devil of 1612,
The wren is making amends here (and elsewhere in folklore¹) for its faux pas with St Stephen/Jesus, but in general, the old trope – female bad, male good – is at work in these various legends. The female ‘Mag’-pie, similarly, is painted in a cynical light, as a thief and scold. Gendered stereotypes run through folklore with all the subtlety of a Carry On film.
Merry Christmas - here’s your dead RobinGardener’s friend and harbinger of deathIn the sixth century, St Serf of Culross in Fife had a robin companion that perched on his head or shoulder when he prayed. Serf began hand-feeding the bird. He was understandably upset when some of his disciples killed the robin, but Kentigern (aka St Mungo) brought the bird back to life. Mungo is associated with Glasgow, and the robin still features on the city’s coat of arms. Affection for the robin was reinforced by – or perhaps originated in – its relative tameness. It is referred to as “the tame ruddok” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1382 Parlement of Fowles. The bird has always been the gardener’s companion, its beady eye alert for wriggly food in the freshly-turned soil. Beyond the backyards and allotments, the robin’s worm-hungry attendance at freshly dug graves turned the folklore a bit sour, as the bird became a folkloric companion of the dead, but a fond mourner rather than a seeker of carrion. Consequently, a robin in the house is seen as a harbinger of death, but as a kind of guardian angel presiding over the person’s passing rather than a crow or raven cackling its consolation-free doom. Walter Scott captured these sentiments in his bleak and poignant poem Proud Maisie (1818):
There are numerous anecdotal tales of robins entering houses immediately before and after a death, but less morbid folklore asserts that a robin in the house is a sign of oncoming frost or snow. When they linger near a house or on its threshold or window ledges, it is a sign of rain. Sticking with weatherlore, a robin singing from a rooftop or high in a bush or tree heralds fine weather, while a song delivered from lower down or within a hedge means meteorological misery.
Britain’s national birdThe robin’s fondness for nesting in human spaces such as potting sheds and old boots and kettles has endeared it to us further. There are many tales of eccentric nesting sites, including a cannon-shot hole in the mast of the HMS Victory, against which Admiral Horatio Nelson had been leaning when he received his fatal wound at the Battle of Trafalgar. The mast was in Bushy House in London at the time of the robin’s nest building. Affection for the robin resulted in it being adopted as Britain’s national bird in 1960. This is not just sentimental attachment – the British robin is a subspecies, Erithacus rubecula melophilus (meaning “little red bird”, with the subspecies name “song-loving”) and is notably friendlier than other European robins, which are essentially shy woodland birds. Friendliness translates into good luck, hence old sayings such as “Good luck to you, good luck to me, good luck to every robin I see”. Somerset folklore asserts that anyone who steals robins’ eggs will develop crooked fingers. Writing in 1787, Francis Grose noted,
Similarly, Flora Thompson notes in Lark Rise (1939),
In the unusually harsh winter of 1947, many wild birds were captured for food, but in Norfolk, any robins blundering into the nets or quicklime were reverently buried rather than eaten. This respect is captured in rhymes such as this, first recorded in the late 18th century:
(Alternative second couplet: “The martin and the swallow are God’s mate and marrow”) William Blake summed up British national feeling for the bird in Auguries of Innocence (1803), with his lines,
However, putting a dampener on the pro-robin propaganda, Gilbert White notes in his Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789),
But this is a lone voice of cynicism in a chorus of approval. And we can probably pin the affection and positivity down to a simple fact: The robin is still singing in the garden, red-breast aglow, when the world is feeling glum at the onset of winter. That boisterous optimism has won human affection since those far distant days when the robin made himself into an altruistic fire extinguisher to douse the combustible wren.
ReferencesMark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica, 2005 Quentin Cooper and Paul Sullivan, Maypoles, Martyrs and Mayhem, 1994 Elizabeth Knowles (ed), The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, second edition, 2005 John Simpson and Jennifer Speake (eds), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, second edition, 1992 Angela Partington (ed), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, revised third edition, 1998 Gilbert White, ed. J.G. Wood, The Natural History of Selborne (1860 edition) Richard Inwards, Weather Lore, 4th edition, 1945 If you’ve enjoyed this article, please share it with your fellow readers via this button:If you haven’t already, you could support my writing by subscribing, with free or paying options: And as the sound of a boiling kettle is music to my ears, you might consider buying me a one-off or regular cuppa… 1 The wren is most definitely male in the Irish and Manx tradition of Hunting the Wren on St Stephen’s Day, as it is heralded “The wren, the wren, the king of the birds”, echoing the legend in which the wren became king after flying higher than any other bird (by hitching a ride on the eagle’s back). The wren as King and the wren as Jenny play separate roles in folklore. You could argue that the King is Celtic and Jenny is English, but that would be mere surmise). You’re currently a free subscriber to A Stranger In Your Country. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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