NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I cut out of the ‘Morning Post’ of September 15th, 1873, the following piece of fashionable intelligence, as a sufficiently interesting example of the “Sorrowful Paradise” which marriage, and the domestic arrangements connected with it, occasionally construct in the districts of England where Mr. Applegarth’s great principle, “No sentiment ought to be brought into the subject,” would be most consistently approved in all the affairs of life. The inconvenience to his master of the inopportune expression of sentiment on the part of the dog, is a striking corroboration of Mr. Applegarth’s views:—“Charles Dawson, an ironworker, who had left his wife and cohabited with a young woman named Margaret Addison, attacked her in the house with a coal rake on the head and body. He then, when his victim screamed, pressed her neck down on the floor with one of his heavy boots, while with the other he kicked her. He jumped upon her, and finally seized a large earthern pan and dashed it upon her head, killing her on the spot. The whole of the attack was witnessed by a man who was deterred from interfering by a loaded revolver which Dawson held. Dawson decamped, and strong bodies of police guarded the different roads from the town, and searched several of his haunts. At three o’clock yesterday morning a dog recognised to be Dawson’s was followed, and Sergeant Cuthbert broke open the door where the animal was scratching to obtain admission, and captured Dawson, who was sitting on a chair. Although he was armed with a loaded revolver, he offered no resistance.”
I ought to have noted in last ‘Fors,’ respecting the difficulty of spelling, some forms of bad spelling which result from the mere quantity of modern literature, and the familiarity of phrases which are now caught by the eye and ear, without being attentively looked at for an instant, so that spelling and pronunciation go to ruin together.
On the other hand, I print the following portions of a very graceful letter I received early this year, which indicates the diffusion of really sound education. I wish its writer would tell me her employment.
“London, S.E.
“March 9th, 1873.
“And you will not again call yourself our friend, because you are disheartened by our regardlessness of your friendship, and still more, it may be, by the discouraging voice of some on whom you might perhaps more reasonably have counted.
“You say we have never written you a word of encouragement. But don’t you think the fault-finders would be sure to speak first, and loudest? I even, in my loneliness, am able to lend my copies to four, who all look forward to their turn with pleasure. (They get their pleasure for nothing, and I was not quite sure you would approve! until I found you would be willing to lend your Talmud!)
“On one point I grumble and find fault.
“Most of those works which you say you want us to read, I have read; but if I had had to pay the price at which you propose to publish them, they would have cost me £3 and I could not have afforded it; because, much as I delighted in them, I longed for certain other books as well. Many an intelligent working man with a family is poorer than I am.
“I quite thoroughly and heartily sympathise with your contempt for advertising (as it is abused at present, anyway). But I think all good books should be cheap. I would make bad ones as dear as you like.
“Was it not Socrates alone of the great Greeks who would put no price on his wisdom?—and Christ ‘taught daily in their streets.’ I do assure you there are plenty of us teachable enough, if only any one capable of teaching could get near enough, who will never, in this world, be able to afford ‘a doctor’s fee.’
“I wonder—if it be wrong to take interest—of what use my very small savings could be to me in old age? Would it be worth while for working women to save at all?
(Signed) “A Working Woman.”
No, certainly not wrong. The wrong is in the poor wages of good work, which make it impossible to buy books at a proper price, or to save what would be enough for old age. Books should not be cheaper, but work should be dearer.
A young lady writing to me the other day to ask what I really wanted girls to do, I answered as follows, requesting her to copy the answer, that it might serve once for all. I print it accordingly, as perhaps a more simple statement than the one given in ‘Sesame and Lilies.’