Now! Then! 2025! - A Yorkshire Almanac

Excerpt

I am afraid I shall find no one but yourself when I return to England who will deign to look at Pyrenean plants – you appear to be all going mad about railways. I get hold sometimes of a Times or Morning Chronicle, with supplement on supplement of railway advertisements, and I turn over page after page until I am quite in despair of arriving at any news. And when at last I come to something that looks readable, I still find it to consist almost entirely of accounts of railway meetings, etc. You appear also to have undergone such strange metamorphoses! Par exemple, when I read “the Railway King is determined to have a narrow gauge into Cornwall,” it is scarcely credible that his said majesty is no other than my old acquaintance George Hudson, quondam [former] linen draper of York! Alack! alack! what will this world come to!

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

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Via John Bibby (Bibby 2022).

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Original

I am afraid I shall find no one but yourself when I return to England who will deign to look at Pyrenean plants — you appear to be all going mad about railways. I get hold sometimes of a Times or Morning Chronicle, with supplement on supplement of railway advertisements, and I turn over page after page until I am quite in despair of arriving at any news. And when at last I come to something that looks readable, I still find it to consist almost entirely of accounts of railway meetings, etc. You appear also to have undergone such strange metamorphoses! pour exemple, when I read “the Railway King is determined to have a narrow gauge into Cornwall,” it is scarcely credible that his said majesty is no other than my old acquaintance George Hudson, quondam linen draper of York! Alack! alack! what will this world come to!!

160 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Borrer, William (1781-1862) (1), Sussex-based botanist ·
• Botany (4) ·
• Draper (3) ·
• Exploration (3) ·
• France (33) ·
• George Hudson (4) ·
• Linen (3) ·
• Moss (1) ·
• Pyrenees (2) ·
• Railway Mania (5) ·
• Richard Spruce (1) ·
• Ryedale (7) ·
• Spain (9) ·
• Stock market bubble (1) ·
• Terrington (1) ·
• The Times (5) ·
• 📌York (164) ·

All tags.

Similar

1 August 1813: The Leeds-based 51st Foot wear bay leaves, not white roses, on Minden (now Yorkshire) Day, as they drive the French back over the Pyrenees

8 May 1849: Amid revelations of fraud at the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway, Richard Nicholson, business partner and brother-in-law of the Railway King, George Hudson, drowns himself in the Ouse at York

30 July 1798: The homeward-bound Greenland whaler Blenheim fights off a Royal Navy press gang in Hull harbour, killing two boarders

28 November 1796: The Royal Navy seeks recruits among the seamen of Sculcoates, Cottingham and Little Weighton (ER)

5 February 1643: Rioting locals reïnundate Hatfield Chase in protest at flooding and a loss of fishing and fowling caused by Netherlandish colonists and Cornelius Vermuyden’s land reclamation scheme

30 January 1846: Charlotte Brontë tells her old schoolmistress, Margaret Wooler, that Emily’s railway investment strategy may be unsustainable

17 July 1785: Mr Strother, a York draper’s assistant, finds that diarising is not for common folk

17 July 1815: John Dunhill and William Bewell stand trial for their lives shortly after Waterloo, accused of the riotous demolition of a press-gang pub at 41, Humber Street, Hull

19 February 1557: At a tithe hearing, Ralph Dicconson (60) of Malton recalls his visits 40 years ago as a pedlar to Kirkham Priory before its dissolution in 1539

10 August 1756: Leeds “gentlemen” burn an effigy of Admiral John Byng, scapegoat for the Whig government’s failure to save Minorca (and the Mediterranean theatre) from the French during the Seven Years’ War