The Georgian period was the age of elegance of Jane Austen, horse-drawn carriages and country estates but it was also a time of great poverty and harsh punishments. The theft of a sheep or the stealing of a man's silk handkerchief could lead to the hangman's noose. The landscapes of Capability Brown contrasted with the gin-sodden streets of Hogarth's London. But it was also the time of the steam engine and the power loom, Britain's domination of the seas and the making of an Empire both in India and the Americas.
William Hogarth: London's Critical Eye
If Jane Austen’s novels captured the latter part of the Georgian Era in all its country house grandeur then the picture painted some decades earlier by the...
Flora MacDonald: The Reluctant Jacobite
She should have died in obscurity having lived a life unremarked upon in a place as remote from the public consciousness as it was by location from...
Luddites, Captain Swing, Radicals and Reform
On 11 May 1812, Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was walking through the House of Commons lobby on his way to a meeting when John Bellingham...
The Fox Sisters: A Victorian Deception
The 1840’s were a time of great uncertainty in the United States with immigration from Germany, Scandinavia, and in particular famine hit Ireland...
Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Born in London on 26 December 1716, to a family prosperous enough for him to have little need of gainful employment Thomas Gray was to a Cambridge...
Marie Antoinette: The Austrian Whore
She was one of the most reviled figures in history believed to be sexually amoral, corrupt and indifferent to the suffering of others; blamed for her...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan
The son of a vicar from the parish of Mary St Ottery in rural Devon Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to become one of the most significant literary critics of...
Beau Brummell Beau Brummell
He was a fashion icon, the first of his kind, a man known for little more than the clothes he wore and the manner of his being – fragrant, polished, charming...
William Blake: The Proverbs of Hell
William Blake’s ‘The Proverbs of Heaven and Hell’ is taken from his 1793 book ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ his musings on the perpetual torment of...