Cuthbert Collingwood was born on 26 September 1748 in Newcastle upon Tyne, the eldest son of a respectable but poor tradesman. His personal merits would help take him from these modest beginning to the position of Vice-Admiral of the Red and eventually to raise him to the peerage as 1st Baron Collingwood. Hoping for a… Read more Admiral Lord Collingwood
One of the most interesting things about the Regency Era, to me, if how universally loathed the Prince Regent was, and how much he set the fashion for the Glittering Throng nonetheless. One of the things the future George IV brought into style was going to Brighton for a bit of time by (and in)… Read more Brighton, By George!
One of the best things about the Georgian Era was the 1807 Act suppressing the slave trade. King George III, die-hard conservative Tory and intermittently insane though he may have been, agreed with the majority of the Tories and Whigs that the slave trade was a disgusting affront to God and Humanity and Decency and… Read more Huzzah for the HMS Pickle!
William Cowper, one of the Georgian era’s most loved poets, was born on 26 November 1731 (Old Style date was 15 November), in Hertfordshire, the son of a vicar. Although his fame has declined over the decades, his name and works remain familiar for any fan of Jane Austen. Another vicar’s child like Cowper, Austen… Read more William Cowper, Beloved of Jane Austen
For millennia, Western medicine was in thrall to the humoral theory of ancient Greece. It wasn’t until the scientific revolution of the Victorian era that germs were understood to cause illness, but even then medical ideas about a woman’s body had more in common with those espoused by Helenic doctors than modern ones. Germs there… Read more Green Sickness and the Cultural Construction of Women’s Health
The Insurrection of 10 August 1792 was one of the most pivotal moments of the French Revolution. Irate and antimonarchial Frenchmen, including members of the National Guard of the Paris Commune and the fédérés from Marseille and Brittany, attacked Tuileries Palace and arrested King Louis XVI of France. This scared the bejeezus out of the… Read more The French Revolution and English Culture
Georg Ludwig, future King George I of England, came into the world on 28 May 1660 in Hanover, the eldest son of Duke Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg and his wife, Sophia of the Palatinate, who was the Protestant the granddaughter of King James I of England through her mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia. No one thought of baby George as a possible… Read more King George I
On 9 May 1726, five men were hanged at Tyburn for the crime of having committed homosexual sex acts, which became punishable by death in Henry VIII’s reign (under the Buggery Act 1533) and would remain a capital offence until 1828. The men had been some of the 40 individuals arrested during a raid on Mother… Read more Murdering Mollies
Want to avoid bringing debts into your new marriage? Well, there was a way to shift them away … During the 18th and 19th centuries many people in the UK thought (without any legal basis whatsoever) that if a woman got married in her shift (or smock) rather than a gown then any premarital debts… Read more The Shift Marriage
Long before Bernie Sanders shook the foundations of the Left-wing American party, Georgian Britain had to contend with Charles James Fox and the Foxite Whigs. Charles Fox was born in London on 24 January 1749, the second surviving son of Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox. The new newborn Fox was of royal blood, since his… Read more The Foxiest of the Foxite Whigs