Listings for Reader:
Ethel Carnie
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N A : Arabian Nights
Published in The Woman Worker, newspaper: 'As I sat engaged with the very charming adventures of Zobeide, in the "Arabian Nights", and just as I had reached the spot where she comes upon the petrified town, with its stone men and women, and the stone queen with her golden crown, with the beautiful young man who alone had been spared, there came a loud rat-tat on the door. I did not want to talk politics or the factory system, for I was very happy (it is the first time I have read this witching book, and I was in heaven), and scarcely cared to be reminded of the follies and sins of our present social system. I was wandering in a romantic clime full of spices, fountains that spout pearls out of their mouths quite carelessly, and where the giants all come to grief - and did not want bothering with the memroy that I was one of a race that people a globe whirling through space at so many thousand miles per hour. A round ball whose sides are covered with workhouses, prisons, law courts, and asylums, as well as nice houses, and dainty villas, and working men's cottages. Good old Caliph Haroun Alraschid and a fariyland held me in thrall. Ha, ha, but I must check this romantic attitude of mind; I am told it is leading me to paint factory life blacker than it is'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Carnie Print: Book
John Ruskin : Praeterita
A reminiscence of reading John Ruskin's autobiography, Praeterita (pub 1881-6) at work. Published in The Wheatsheaf: 'Long ago, with the engine groaning below the wooden, dusty floor of a hot winding-room in a cotton factory, I read the description of a little wood overhanging the Falls of Schaffhausen. Ruskin had written it; and in his words was the beat of the waters and the colour of the flowers, and I longed to see the reality. Yet his description is only the shadow of the real glory of those Schaffhausen meadows'.
